A new patent from Apple published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office points to the company working on a glucose monitoring tech for the Apple Watch. The patent titled “Reference Switch Architectures for Non-Contact Sensing of Substances”  points to “systems and methods for measuring a concentration and type of substance in a sample.”

The patent points to Apple using a light source, optics, modulators, detector, and other such components to measure the blood sugar level or something similar in a non-invasive manner. Apple’s patent does not particularly reference blood sugar monitoring using the technology but from the patent, the tech sounds apt to achieve exactly that.

The systems can include a light source, optics, one or more modulators, a reference, a detector, and a controller. The systems and methods disclosed can be capable of accounting for drift originating from the light source, one or more optics, and the detector by sharing one or more components between different measurement light paths. Additionally, the systems can be capable of differentiating between different types of drift and eliminating erroneous measurements due to stray light with the placement of one or more modulators between the light source and the sample or reference. Furthermore, the systems can be capable of detecting the substance along various locations and depths within the sample by mapping a detector pixel and a microoptics to the location and depth in the sample.

There have been rumors of Apple working bringing non-invasive blood sugar monitoring to the Apple Watch. The company reportedly has a secret team working on the project, though the last rumor surrounding the project pointed to the technology still being “years away” from being ready. Sadly, the publishing of a patent from the U.S. PTO does not indicate that the technology is ready to debut with the Apple Watch Series 4.