Apple’s Research Team Isn’t Just Working On Glucose Monitoring

Apple has a secret team called the Exploratory Design Group or XDG, which operates as a startup inside the company and consists of several hundred people, mostly engineers and scientists. The main focus of this group is to work on noninvasive blood glucose monitoring technology for the Apple Watch.

If XDG can successfully develop this technology for the Apple Watch, one day Apple Watch users will be able to monitor their blood glucose levels directly on their Apple Watch, without having to prick themselves with a needle to draw blood and use a blood glucose monitor.

Apple Exploratory Design Group
Details about the Apple Exploratory Design Group were revealed by Mark Gurman in his PowerOn newsletter for Bloomberg . While blood glucose monitoring technology is XDG’s main focus, it is also working on other technologies, including next-generation display technology, artificial intelligence and augmented reality/virtual reality headset features to help people with eye diseases.

XDG was originally created to develop next-generation batteries for iPhones and low-power processors. The group is still working on these projects along with other things. Many of the chip and battery technologies developed by XDG have been shipping into Apple products for years.

XDG is part of Apple’s hardware technology group and is led by the company’s senior vice president, Johnny Srouji. The team is based in a building called Tantau 9, which is outside Apple’s spaceship-shaped ring.

The top Apple engineers on the team include Apple engineers and scientists Jeff Koller, Dave Simon, Heather Sullens, Brian Raines and Jared Zerbe.

Gurman did not say when Apple would be able to ship its technology to monitor blood glucose levels without injections with the Apple Watch or how far along the development has been so far.