Oppo Beat Apple Watch To Realtime Blood Sugar Monitoring, But With A Big Catch
Chinese smartphone maker Oppo recently announced two new devices: the new Find N3 Flip foldable phone and the Watch 4 Pro, currently the best alternative to Oppo's Apple Watch. It's also a device that caught my eye because of a feature I'm dying to see Apple add to the Apple Watch: real-time blood glucose measurements.
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I've been waiting for years for the Apple Watch to have a built-in glucose sensor to continuously monitor blood sugar. This feature is said to be under development. However, it may take years to develop a reliable system that can provide readings as accurate as traditional methods of measuring glucose levels that involve drawing blood.
However, it turns out that the Oppo Watch 4 Pro does not have its own blood sugar sensor. Instead, it can be connected to other continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) products.
The Apple Watch is the most popular wearable device in the world and all of Apple's competitors are trying to copy it. However, these companies are not necessarily the first to offer blood glucose sensors. Someone else could beat Apple here.
Samsung, for example, has a Galaxy Watch model that can measure blood pressure. This is another important health sensor that Apple should develop for the Apple Watch.
But blood glucose sensors have to be the holy grail of smartwatch sensors. If someone could do this, it would be a major advance in the treatment and diagnosis of diabetes.
Viewing blood sugar levels through a widget on an iPhone or Apple Watch can help people correct behaviors that can lead to early onset of diabetes.
Diabetics benefit greatly from receiving real-time data from their smartwatch. You can forego traditional methods of measuring blood sugar that involve taking blood. And they will be able to control high or low blood sugar levels immediately. Over time, improved blood sugar control can reduce the effects of excess sugar on other organs.
Real-time blood glucose data is particularly important for people with type 1 diabetes or insulin-dependent diabetes. That's why CGM products exist. They constantly monitor blood sugar levels to detect this form of diabetes.
Coming back to the Oppo Watch 4 Pro, what caught my attention was the claim that it offers “real-time continuous display of meter readings.” Please note that this is a machine translation of the product page for China. The footnote in the screenshot below is a warning sign. This indicates that the Oppo Watch may not have a built-in glucose sensor.
If you read the footnotes, you'll notice that you need to connect the watch to a CGM device and use a third-party app. Scroll down and Oppo lists three devices that work with the Oppo Watch 4 Pro, including Sannuo, Abbott and Weitai.
Oppo's idea of wirelessly connecting the Watch 4 Pro to a third-party CGM to measure blood sugar levels is laudable, but you can probably already connect your smartphone directly to some of these CGM devices. Oppo has not revealed any further information about the specific partnership that will enable this feature exclusively for its new wearable device.
However, the Oppo Watch 4 Pro appears to be a premium smartwatch alternative to the Apple Watch, although it is not yet clear when the wearable device will launch in international markets.
