On Thursday, the US Patent and Trademark Office published a patent application from Apple that relates to a wearable self-mixing interferometry (SMI) ring that could be used to sense the physiological conditions of a user, such as a heart rate, blood oxygen saturation, and blood pressure.
It could support an OLED display with indicator lights and make the Apple Watch completely unnecessary. This is a bit sad as Apple was granted a patent for the ECG feature for Apple Watch recently.
Apple describes the ring as providing input structures such as switches, buttons, touchscreen inputs, voice inputs, and so on. For example, the wearable device (ring #102) includes touch and/or force sensors (e.g., integrated into one or more displays of these devices).
The ring may detect force and/or touch inputs, whether static or motions, speed, direction, force, displacement, or other parameters of gestures applied to the input regions, including taps, swipes, multi-finger inputs, single- or multi-finger touch gestures, presses, and the like. Such user inputs may be used to control or modify the operation of the ring.
The actual invention is really about the self-mixing interferometry sensors (SMI) which enable a sensor to be positioned within the housing and configured to output coherent light toward a skin of the user when the housing is worn.
The sensor may also include a detector configured to detect a portion of coherent light reflected towards the sensor and generate electrical signals that indicate skin displacements based on the portion of coherent light. The electronic device may further include a transmitter operatively coupled with the sensor and configured to transmit physiological data based on the electrical signals.
The side effects will be that once you start wearing the ring you will turn invisible to sane people who will no longer wish to hear you speaking about your wonderful ring. You will slowly surrender your will to the ghost of Steve Jobs and will wander the land as a shadow, grasping at Apple gear hissing "precious" before a horizontally challenged person casts you into a nearby volcano.