The company has apparently hired a small team of biomechanical engineers to work on the project as well!
Apple has hired a team of biomedical engineers as part of a secret initiative, initially envisioned by late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, to develop sensors to treat diabetes, CNBC reported citing three people familiar with the matter.
An Apple spokeswoman declined to comment. The engineers are expected to work at a nondescript office in Palo Alto, California, close to the corporate headquarters, the report added. The team is said to report to Johny Srouji, Apple's senior vice president of hardware technologies. It was apparently, previously led by Michael D. Hillman, who left Apple in late 2015 and later joined Facebook's Oculus as head of hardware. At the moment, 30 people are said to be working on the team, since the past one year.
In the last few years, the number of people with diabetes has risen from 108 million in 1980 to 422 million in 2014. It has been a major cause of blindness, kidney failure, heart attacks, stroke and lower limb amputation. WHO projects that diabetes will be the 7th leading cause of death in 2030. In an attempt to help change the scenario, tech companies are coming together to help those afflicted. This breakthrough could effectively help millions of people worldwide with diabetes.
The news comes at the time when the line between pharmaceuticals and technology is blurring as companies are joining forces to tackle chronic diseases using high-tech devices that combine biology, software and hardware, thereby jump-starting a novel field of medicine called bioelectronics.
Last year, GlaxoSmithKline and Google parent Alphabet unveiled a joint company aimed at marketing bioelectronic devices to fight illness by attaching to individual nerves. US biotech firms Setpoint Medical and EnteroMedics Inc have already shown early benefits of bioelectronics in treating rheumatoid arthritis and suppressing appetite in the obese. Other companies playing around the idea of bioelectronics include Medtronic, Proteus Digital Technology, Sanofi SA and Biogen.
With inputs from Reuters
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