Samsung's Galaxy Watch 3 successor could feature a high-precision blood glucose monitor

In what is likely to come as a big relief to patients struggle with high blood sugar, Samsung’s highly capable Galaxy Watches that are rumoured to arrive later this year could get a lot smarter than their predecessors before them, according to a report from a Korean news website.

Currently, patients who suffer from high blood sugar usually have to prick their fingers to pick up a small sample of blood which can be used to check their levels. While this would be alright on an occasional basis, many patients have to do it multiple times a day. Moreover, not every patient is comfortable around blood and some would prefer a less painful option. Here’s why the rumoured Galaxy Watch 4 getting a blood sugar monitor could be a big deal.

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According to the report, the upcoming smartwatch could use a non-invasive approach to monitoring a patient’s blood sugar levels. It refers to a technology that the Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology (SAIT) last year worked on, called Raman spectroscopy. The technique reportedly looks at the vibrations from molecules when a laser light is focused on it, making sense of the wavelengths caused by the movements. Samsung had claimed last year that their system helped them demonstrate one of the highest prediction accuracies among non-invasive technologies.

While adding support for a blood glucose monitor represents a big improvement over and a great addition to the ECG sensor on the previous Galaxy Watches, it remains to be seen whether the devices, which can clearly double as medical devices for diabetic patients, will get the requisite medical permissions. Regions that do not grant permission to the South Korean manufacturer could still see the same device shipping to those areas - the software support for those features will simply remain disabled until they are granted.