The Apple Watch could come with a number of new health-tracking features, some of which might make an appearance by 2022, according to a new report by Wall Street Journal. The report notes that Apple is working on adding features such as blood pressure measurement, temperature, blood sugar monitoring to the watch, but cautions that many of these might never actually make their way to the products. That's because there are several challenges in figuring out the technology in order to incorporate these features onto the Apple Watch. The features that will likely make it to the Apple Watch 2022 are fertility tracking, which will look at the body temperature and improvements to Apple's irregular-heartbeat monitoring, and an upgrade to how the Watch tracks sleep patterns. This is not the first report to talk of a temperature sensor coming to the Apple Watch. According to an earlier report from Bloomberg, Apple had plans to add the body temperature sensor in this year’s model or what is being referred to as Apple Watch Series 7. But the report said that the feature would be shifted to the 2022 version. One of the key use cases for temperature sensing is expected to involve fertility tracking, according to the report by Wall Street Journal. An increase in basal body temperature is usually seen during the ovulation period in women, and if the Apple Watch can help indicate this, it could provide a small, but useful indicator for couples trying to conceive. The Bloomberg report also talked about the blood sugar monitoring feature but noted that it was not ready for commercial usage. The WSJ report goes further into this and states that Apple has been trying to make a breakthrough around blood-sugar monitoring for years, but has not seen any success when it comes to developing a non-invasive method for the same. The report also explains that the blood pressure feature could be part of a completely separate device, a cuffless device, which would work without inflating. But the report said that the sources, which mentioned this cautioned that the product was in a "very early stage" of development, so it might not actually become a commercial reality. Apple is also reportedly planning to expand the Watch’s sleep and blood oxygen tracking abilities to allow it to detect sleep apnea, which is a condition that causes people to stop breathing during sleep. Meanwhile, reports have said that the newer Apple Watch Series 7 could face production delays. The Apple Watch Series 7 is supposed to come with a bigger display; this year's series will have a 41mm and 45mm display size.
