How can Apple Watch's sensors evolve?

Apple, who is learning from Fitbit and preparing to focus Apple Watch on “health and fitness detection”, what are the possible development directions based on current patents and technologies?

New heart rate detection

At present, the Apple Watch's compact body actually has only two types of sensors: azimuth-related acceleration sensors, gyroscopes, and heart rate sensors. So these two technologies are the main ways Apple Watch is currently used to detect body information.

In an Apple patent, they describe a new way to enhance heart rate sensing. It is well known that Apple uses an LED photodetector to calculate the frequency of heartbeat by using green light on the skin and by the difference in blood absorption. Therefore, the content of this patent is to distinguish it in more detail. The frequency of the heartbeat, or the composition of the blood, to distinguish the user's identity, in other words, through the heart rate, to achieve the same effect as Touch ID, iris recognition.

â–² Apple Watch's heart rate sensor schematic. (Source: Apple)

In conjunction with this technology, there is also the collaboration of the acceleration sensor, which allows the user to trigger the heart rate identification process by raising the wrist. In this way, the direct benefit to the user is that in addition to theft prevention, another advantage may be that the mobile payment of the wearable device can be more convenient.

Interestingly, in addition to identifying heart rate, the same technique can be used to identify other components in the blood, such as oxygen and carbon dioxide, and even health-related blood sugar. Apple digs a few scientists from a California company, C8 Medisensors, two years ago. The company's technology is mainly to study the reaction of specific molecules to light, establish the correct frequency, and then let the wearable device have the ability to calculate the "concentration" of these molecules through the light sensor.

However, these technologies have not yet developed an effective method to identify the proportion of specific elements from blood of different compositions and proportions.

Acceleration sensor

Due to the current LED light sensor, it is difficult to carefully filter the “noise” and calculate the true heart rate during exercise. Therefore, the current commercial development focus of Apple actually describes the efficiency and process of user motion, and then designs More private health and exercise guidelines. In other words, it is to create a more accurate algorithm and add more sophisticated vector observations.

â–² (Source: Flickr/Jon Fingas CC BY 2.0)

In October, Apple opened its own sports monitoring laboratory to visit Bloomberg. For confidentiality, the subjects were all volunteering Apple employees, so the lab was no different from the college's retraining room. The staff is here to step on the flywheel to jog as usual, except that in addition to wearing the instrument, they must follow the control variables such as time, group number and heart rate. Apple pointed out that these 16,000 cumulative, 17,000-hour experiments were designed to build their own algorithms.

In addition, since the existing gyroscope and acceleration sensor can only basically locate the tilt angle, the rest is based on various compensation mechanisms and software calculations to estimate the user's exercise effect, such as the newly launched swimming training, therefore, Apple's The patent also portrays new ways to find more detailed movements through more sensors, such as waving a hand, turning a wrist, or awakening a specific function by lifting the wrist as described above.

The acceleration motion sensing that AirPods also has is also appearing in the patent. On AirPods, the user launches Siri by tapping, and this action has become a possible way for Apple Watch to operate.

It is worth mentioning that despite the fact that it is not directly related to Apple, Carnegie Mellon’s team has released a technology called ViBand, which allows wearable devices to feel the delicate movements of their fingers, such as fist clenching. Grab, stretch or finger. The user can even tap his or her back or arm to instruct the watch to do something.

The technical principle of ViBand is not complicated. It is mainly to increase the frequency of the acceleration sensor from the general 100Hz to the extreme speed of 4000Hz, so it can record very fine "vibration", like taking things. The team at Carnegie Mellon University also released a demonstration demonstrating that when a user picks up a particular item, like a guitar, the watch automatically senses and determines what is in the user's hand.

ViBand can also work with products including Apple Watch because it is primarily resolved and calculated by software, without the need for additional sensors.

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