Know Labs Inc (KNW)

[tim00mike]

Rockley Photonics to Deliver Glucose Monitoring for Apple Smartwatches

https://www.eetimes.com/rockley-photonics-to-deliver-glucose-monitoring-for-apple-smartwatches/#

Apple began purchasing products from Rockley in 2017; it is now Rockley’s largest customer with $70 million of NRE commitment to date.

He said Rockley’s technology is up to a million times more accurate than existing LEDs in high-end smartwatches today. “Smartwatches have LEDs that shine light into your skin, monitoring the scattered light that comes back to measure your pulse and, in the high-end versions, your blood oxygen. With this market taking off, it created a new opportunity for us to exploit an idea we had many years back to create a much more powerful optical sensing chip for non-invasive biomarker monitoring. The aim of Rockley was to develop a third-generation silicon photonics process that overcame the remaining hyperscale manufacturing issues and provided a wider breadth of performance capabilities compared to current processes.”

Rickman added, “We’ve shrunk a laboratory spectrometer onto a chip, creating a “clinic on a wrist.” Traditionally, when you shrink an optical instrument, the performance generally gets worse as you get less light into the device. But in this particular case, the innovative architecture we’ve designed allows our device to actually have two orders of magnitude improvement over the benchtop instrument. This is not an average spectrometer, this is a highly advanced spectrometer.”

Rockley said it has developed two products for smartwatches: a basic module and an advanced module. The basic module contains what is already seen today in a high-end smartwatch, which is blood oxygen, heart rate, and breath rate, but adds to that biomarkers that are in great demand including hydration, core body temperature, and blood pressure. Adding onto that in the advanced module, which has roughly double the number of lasers as the basic module, it has extended the infrared spectroscopy range and uses more advanced algorithms to detect alcohol, carbon monoxide, glucose indicator, and lactate.

It hopes this will set the scene for enabling continuous glucose monitoring, which it said is the holy grail of consumer wellness wearables. Other biomarkers it will be investigating in this device include albumin, urea, and creatinine, which through continuous monitoring can produce health trends and alerts for disease detection and management.