Apple hiring heavily in medical tech

Apple is hiring biomedical engineers with experience in health technology, according to a BuzzFeed report, potentially signalling a variety of digital health R&D projects in the pipeline. The job postings call for engineers with a background in “medical, health, wellness and/or fitness sensors, devices, and applications”. Recent hires include other experts from the medtech world, including Anne Shelchuk, who has a doctorate in biomedical engineering, Jay Mung from Medtronic, where he headed the algorithmic team behind the company's continuous glucose monitoring solution, and Jennifer Hillier, another remote monitoring expert. 

What comes after the Apple Watch? The Apple Watch 2? A new fitness- and health-focused wearable? Something else entirely? That’s not yet clear, but Apple is hard at work on whatever it is, as a handful of new hires and job postings suggest.

Apple demonstrated its interest in health and medicine last spring and summer by releasing the Apple Watch, whose biometric sensors make the device an activity and heart rate tracker, and ResearchKit, a software framework that lets researchers conduct clinical trials through iPhone apps. And the company's efforts in the wearable space are likely to continue: An Apple Watch 2 with updated features is rumored to arrive sometime this year, and, late last year, Cook hinted that Apple may have a separate health-related project in the works.

“We don’t want to put the watch through the Food and Drug Administration process,” he told The Telegraph. “I wouldn’t mind putting something adjacent to the watch through it, but not the watch, because it would hold us back from innovating too much, the cycles are too long. But you can begin to envision other things that might be adjacent to it — maybe an app, maybe something else.”

Cook’s interview ran Nov. 10. Since November, Apple has posted at least four job listings in its health technology division, among them listings for biomedical engineers and a lab technician, mostly focused on devices that measure physiological signs. And since October, at least five people with medical research and development experience have joined Apple, according to a review of LinkedIn profiles.

A similar biotech hiring spree previously took place in spring 2014, when the Apple Watch was still in development. An Apple spokesperson declined to comment. But the latest crop of hires and job postings give some clues as to what Apple’s next health project might be.

