Apple’s next major sensor addition to the Apple Watch may not be coming anytime soon, and rumored features like blood sugar monitoring and blood pressure tracking may be a few years away. The Apple Watch has been steadily adding new features and updating its design with each successive update. However, while some major features are rumored to be coming soon, one report says it may take a while for these features to appear in the finished product.
Rumors over the years have floated the idea of Apple bringing some form of non-invasive blood sugar monitoring to the Apple Watch, and the company has repeatedly said it is working on the idea. But according to Bloomberg’s “Power On” newsletter on Sunday, Mark Gurman expects glucose monitoring to be far from practical.
I wouldn’t be surprised if glucose monitoring didn’t land until the second half of a decade,” Gurman wrote. Another feature that could have a long wait time is blood pressure monitoring. Although there has been research and patents on the concept, Gurman believes the feature is “at least two to three years away.
The most pressing of the three features Gurman discusses is temperature reading. Research on the feature has been going on since at least 2019, and analysts predict it will be included in the Apple Watch Series 8. According to Sunday’s newsletter, Gurman poured water in the hope that it will arrive in 2022. Body temperature monitoring is still on the roadmap for this year, but there has been a noticeable slowdown in news about it recently, he wrote.
The 2022 release is thought to include three models, with the Series 8 accompanied by a ruggedized model, and an update to the Apple Watch SE.