iFixit’s teardown of the Apple Watch has revealed that the sophisticated heart-rate monitor used is actually capable of acting as a pulse oximeter, allowing it to calculate the oxygen content of your blood by measuring how much infrared light is absorbed. This data would be useful for health and fitness monitoring, but the functionality is not currently enabled in the watch.
As iFixit notes, there are a couple of possible reasons Apple is not currently allowing to watch to display this data …
First, it may simply be that the company hasn’t yet achieved the necessary accuracy and reliability from the sensor. If this is indeed the case, we’ll need to wait for a second- or third-generation Apple Watch to take advantage of this capability.
But it may also be that Apple is awaiting FDA approval of this usage of the sensor. If that turns out to be true, then it’s possible that a software update could later enable the feature for existing first-gen Apple Watch owners.
The Food & Drug Administration is on record as stating that it intends light-touch regulation of fitness-orientated wearables, but is likely to apply stricter standards to those features which veer more toward the medical diagnosis end of the scale.
Via TNW
FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More.
Exciting! I don’t believe Apple has every shipped anything that had disabled hardware like this, that could potentially be enabled in a future update. Hopefully it’s just FDA stuff they are waiting on.
Yes they have on the OG iPhone.
elaborate please, what was it? I don’t recall
The radio chipset inside the iPhone has the ability to receive FM radio stations but it has never been turned on. It’s similar to the feature found in recent models of the iPod nano, including the one that sparked the numerous watch band accessories. It used the headphones as the antenna to receive FM radio stations. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202096
They certainly have. When 802.11n was new, they shipped computers (iMacs if I remember correctly) with the “n” feature disabled. It could be enabled with the installation of a small piece of software. It was shipped disabled, because, 802.11n had not been ratified and the variation implemented in those Macs may not have been what ultimately went to spec.
But it was, and Apple made the upgrade software available for a small fee.
They have on other instances, like with bluetooth on the second gen apple tv
That’s definitely one of the features I had been hoping for originally, but I’ll wait until Apple actually enables it before getting an AppleWatch. I wish all the sensors had been enabled, but I suppose it was too much to hope for. Let’s see how well battery life is with what it already has enabled.
FDA approval, and it doesn’t affect batt life.
*FCC
Actually, the current Apple watch employs green and infrared light sources. In order to measure blood oxygen saturation you require a red and infrared light source. Hence the current hardware is only able to measure heart rate but not the blood oxygen saturation level. Also, measurements of blood oxygen saturation using red and infrared light only are very susceptible to motion interference and perfusion levels at the wrist are low to begin with, making it even more difficult to accurately measure oxygen saturation at this particular site.
There is advanced spectral sensing technology available that avoids such limitations and I am sure Apple is evaluating these for further generations of the Watch.