Apple has filed for another patent involving “smart bands” for the Apple Watch that could provide health, medical, or fitness information.
Future Apple Watch bands will include additional sensors, battery volume, and other components. There are a number of ways Apple could incorporate technology into Watch bands, including even a modular approach. For example, you could swap out one Watch bands for another with built-in battery, extending the Watch’s usability.
Here’s Apple’s summary of the invention: “A wearable electronic device includes a housing and a band attached to the housing. The band has an indicator with a variably and/or progressively illuminable portion. The indicator of the band conveys to a user an analog representation of the completion progress of an activity or task tracked by wearable electronic device.
“The wearable electronic device also includes a processing unit within the housing, and a sensor operatively coupled to the processing unit. In some cases, the sensor is a motion sensor such as an accelerometer or a gyroscope. In other examples, the sensor is a health sensor or a biometric sensor. Sensor data is used to update the indicator.”
Of course, Apple files for — and is granted — lots of patents by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office. Many are for inventions that never see the light of day. However, you never can tell which ones will materialize in a real product.
