Apple has started putting together a medical tech team, giving a preview of the company's plan for its upcoming iWatch and other wearable devices.
In the past twelve months, more than half a dozen people have moved to the company - a researcher, some hardware experts and other medical professionals among them. The profiles of several biomedicine experts' LinkedIn accounts were updated after their relocation to Apple. According to ZDNet, the list of new employees included biomedical engineers, chief medical officers and chief technology officers from companies like Vital Connect, Sano Intelligence, O2 MedTech and Masimo.
Last year, Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook highlighted sensor technology as a field that is about to explode. It now appears that a good number of the company's newly hired roster of medical experts is from that sector.
Malay Gandhi, chief strategy officer at Rock Health, a venture capital firm based in San Francisco that has helped some wearable tech startups, said that he knew about the hiring. "This is a very specific play in the bio-sensing space," he shared to Reuters.
Industry insiders are speculating that Apple is looking far beyond the features of the world's current crop of wearable devices. Apart from fitness, the company may be gearing up for other monitoring functions in health and nutrition. The iWatch could monitor heart rate, blood sugar levels, and body temperature.
The purveyor of the iPod and iPhone seems to be making good on its promise to bring new product categories to the market this year. The company has not released a new product since the iPad in 2010, and it is under investor pressure to do so. The timing of the new hires puts Apple on track for new technology and software announcements relating to new products in the pipeline at its annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in June.
