Two rumors have been floating around for a bit now: The first is that this year’s Apple Watch will adopt a glucose monitor, and the second is that the Health app will be gaining food tracking. If both of these are true, they could be transformative together for people with diabetes and those just trying to eat healthier.
Glucose or blood sugar monitors are vital tools for people with diabetes. They’re an essentially item for living life. If Apple can squeeze one into the Apple Watch and make it work entirely without a blood drop prick, it would not only make it easier for people, but it would also make it more natural.
If Apple Watch could continuously monitor your blood sugar levels, it could also detect when you’ve likely eaten. If your blood sugar spikes, your watch can tell you’ve probably consumed something high in sugar. It could deliver a notification, like the one that appears when the watch detects you are working out.
What could make these notifications even better is if they had time-based intelligent suggestions. If it detects a spike in the morning, it could suggest a list of foods commonly eaten at that time of day for you to log. The same thing could happen at lunch and dinner times. The more foods you log, the more the watch gets to know you. It would eventually suggest foods you commonly eat rather than general suggestions for that time of day.
This would make logging foods that are eaten easier for everyone. One of the most frustrating things about keeping food journals is having to manually enter every single listing. If your Apple Watch could detect the effects that foods are having on your body and intelligently suggest a list of foods you normally eat, it would make food journals easy to use for anyone.
Presumably, Apple would include a dedicated “Glucose” app on the watch. I actually mocked that up a few months ago and have refreshed it for this particular concept. In addition to the notifications, if you manually take a reading, the watch could let you associate a logged food with that reading.
A separate food app could show you all of the foods you’ve logged with your Watch or iPhone in the Health app. You could view what you’ve eaten by the day, week, or month. Of course, if you choose to use the Glucose app in tandem with the Food app, it could show you your glucose readings at the time you ate a particular food.
The Apple Watch has already become an incredibly powerful health tracking tool, and every year, Apple seems to add more metrics you can keep track of. Tracking your food habits and your glucose levels together could instantly open the watch up to more customers and help change lives in the process.
What do you think about Apple potentially bringing food tracking and glucose monitoring to iPhone and Apple Watch, respectively? Let us know in the comments below!
