{"id":255399,"date":"2026-01-21T02:48:26","date_gmt":"2026-01-21T02:48:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/255399\/"},"modified":"2026-01-21T02:48:26","modified_gmt":"2026-01-21T02:48:26","slug":"the-race-to-put-a-doctor-on-your-wrist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/255399\/","title":{"rendered":"The race to put a doctor on your wrist"},"content":{"rendered":"

Like that couch from Friends, smartwatches are in the midst of a pivot. A sector that was originally all about activity tracking and taking phone calls like a spy has refocused over the past decade, with players in the wearable tech space now competing<\/a> to be the best in health monitoring.<\/p>\n

Fitbit opened the floodgates. The first popular name in fitness wearables sold tens of millions of devices that tracked steps, calories, sleep, and heart rate between 2009 and 2016. Then, Big Tech got involved:<\/p>\n

Apple quickly made strides in wellness after debuting the Apple Watch as a general-purpose smartwatch. It added an ECG feature in 2018 that made it the first mainstream wearable to detect signs of an irregular heartbeat.That same year, Samsung rebranded its largely unpopular smartwatch series under the Galaxy moniker and leaned harder into health with stress tracking and upgraded sleep monitoring.Google bought Fitbit in 2021 and launched the Pixel Watch in 2022 with most of these features. The following year, it added blood oxygen reading, which by then was industry-standard.<\/p>\n

And now…though the Apple Watch has a \u201cnot a medical device\u201d disclaimer, it\u2019s wading deeper into healthcare. Over the past year and a half, Apple has added sleep apnea notifications and alerts for hypertension warning signs.<\/p>\n

Diabetes management is the next frontier<\/p>\n

No smartwatch can measure blood sugar levels\u2014yet. Whichever company cracks that first could flip the glucose monitoring industry on its head, affecting ~40 million Americans with diabetes and possibly spelling trouble for the makers of diabetic patches that use microneedles to detect rising glucose.<\/p>\n

Apple has spent hundreds of millions of dollars working on no-prick tech, but\u2014as of last year\u2014it\u2019s still \u201cmany years away\u201d from being ready, according to Bloomberg\u2019s Mark Gurman. Samsung\u2019s noninvasive glucose sensor is also in the works, but no delivery date has been announced. Meanwhile, the device that looks best positioned to break through first is a wearable breath monitor from PreEvnt called Isaac<\/a> that wowed at CES this month and is currently in clinical trials.<\/p>\n

Counterpoint: Smartwatches may be more optimized for health-tracking than ever\u2026but that can carry privacy concerns. There\u2019s no federal law barring wearable tech companies from selling your data, and HIPAA largely doesn\u2019t apply<\/a> to the devices either, according to Healthcare Brew.\u2014ML<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Like that couch from Friends, smartwatches are in the midst of a pivot. A sector that was originally…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":255400,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[103,397,396,61,60],"class_list":{"0":"post-255399","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-healthcare","8":"tag-health","9":"tag-health-care","10":"tag-healthcare","11":"tag-ie","12":"tag-ireland"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/255399","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=255399"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/255399\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/255400"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=255399"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=255399"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=255399"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}