Apple appoints new head of team developing Watch’s glucose tracker
(Bloomberg) — Apple Inc. has named a new leader for its secretive group working on noninvasive blood sugar monitors, putting a veteran iPhone and Mac chip executive in charge of one of the company’s most ambitious efforts in health technology. Has been appointed.
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Apple’s vice president of platform architecture, Tim Millett, took over the project after being left without a dedicated leader for several months, according to people familiar with the change, who asked not to be identified because the matter is private. Has taken charge. The team leading the work, called the Exploratory Design Group, or XDG, was previously led by scientist Bill Athas, who died late last year.
Following Athas’s death, the group was overseen on an ad hoc basis by his former representatives, who were promoted to report directly to Johnny Srouzi, Apple’s senior vice president of hardware technologies. The glucose-tracking team now reports to Millett, who has been one of Sruzzi’s top two lieutenants for a decade and has been an Apple employee for nearly 19 years.
Read more: Apple makes progress in secret effort to track glucose on Watch
A spokesman for Cupertino, California-based Apple declined to comment on the change.
Earlier this week, the company announced an updated Apple Watch with a faster processor, but didn’t say much about new health-related features. However, over the years it has added sensors to measure blood oxygen and body temperature. It is also working on a blood pressure monitor for release in the next two years. The hope for the glucose monitor is that it will eventually be compact enough to fit in an Apple Watch as well.
In recent years, Millet has been a key figure in Apple’s transition from Intel Corp. chips to its own M1 and M2 processors, serving as a spokesperson for some of the new Mac semiconductor designs during Apple’s product presentations and media interviews. Used to be. Inside the company, he leads several teams for the development of next generation processors and other computer components.
The group working on the glucose tracker resides within Apple’s semiconductor organization because the system relies on an advanced chip-based system. It uses a series of sensors to shoot a laser into the skin and determine how much glucose is present in a person’s body. Combined with artificial intelligence algorithms, the chip can determine a person’s blood sugar.
Read more: Apple’s ‘XDG’ team is working on more than just glucose monitors
Bloomberg News reported in February that Apple has been developing a blood sugar monitor since about 2011 and has recently made progress on the work. Inside the Apple Watch Consumer launch is still years away, but people working on the project — codenamed E5 — say the company has proven internally that the system works.
The company recently miniaturized the technology into a handheld gadget the size of an iPhone, and is now focused on miniaturizing it into a system that can fit in a wrist-worn device.
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