Apple Planning App Store-Like Health Platform for Connected Medical Devices

While wearable biometric devices are believed to be Apple’s immediate interest, some suspect that a new platform is the company’s longer-term play. “There’s no doubt that Apple is sniffing around this area,” health technology expert Ted Driscoll told Reuters.

“There’s no doubt that Apple is sniffing around this area,” said Driscoll, a Silicon Valley-based partner at Claremont Creek Ventures, which specializes in digital health and medical devices. He said Apple seemed primarily focused on recruiting engineers with experience in “monitoring the body’s perimeters.”

Cupertino, Calif.-based Apple has hired a number of biomedical sensor experts in recent months from companies including Vital Connect, Masimo Corp., Sano Intelligence and O2 MedTech — moves that Rock Health executive Malay Gandhi claims are indicative of “a very specific play in the bio-sensing space.” They include the fitness expert behind Nike’s FuelBand, a healthcare privacy expert, and various scientists with expertise in non-invasive blood glucose monitoring and pulse oximetry.

Masimo is best known for its pulse oximetry device, which non-invasively measures patients’ oxygen saturation, an indicator of respiratory function. Vital Connect focuses on tracking vitals like heart rate and body temperature. O2 Med Tech also is experimenting with biosensors and developing new devices.

A LinkedIn search shows Masimo chief medical officer Michael O’Reilly; Cercacor chief technology officer Marcelo Lamego; and Vital Connect’s Ravi Narasimhan, vice president of biosensor technology, and Nima Ferdosi, an embedded sensors expert, are among those who have moved over to Apple.

One source said Alexander Chan, a former biomedical engineer at Vital Connect, has also defected. His LinkedIn profile states he now works at a “technology company.”

Apple has also hired hardware experts Nancy Dougherty, formerly of wearable sensor company Sano Intelligence, and Todd Whitehurst, vice president of product at Senseonics Inc, a glucose monitoring product, according to their LinkedIn profiles.

And most recently, Divya Nag, founder of StartX Med, a Stanford-affiliated startup accelerator, joined an Apple research and development team to focus on an unspecified healthcare product, two people familiar with the matter say.

Many of these hires are said to have joined the company with little idea of what they would ultimately be working on, a sign that Apple may be trying to build a health-focused unit more broad than previously anticipated.

“Some of the talent (Apple recruited) has access to deep wells of trade secrets and information,” pulse oximetry firm Masimo’s CEO Joe Kiani said, adding that Apple is “just buying people” with large compensation packages. Masimo’s former research director is among those who have moved to Cupertino in recent months.

Apple already enables step-counting and other motion-related applications through its custom M7 coprocessor found in the A7 CPU that drives the iPhone 5s. But with this year’s anticipated launch of iOS 8, Apple has been rumored to delve even further into the health and fitness market.

In particular, it’s been said that a key feature of iOS 8 may be a so-called “Healthbook” application that would act as a central point for users to measure and track health-related data on their iPhone. This application might interface with a variety of wearable and connected devices that could track information such as weight, heart rate, blood pressure and more.