Huawei says a blood sugar testing device is coming after four years of research

Huawei already has watches that can flag a higher risk of blood sugar problems, but they stop short of actually measuring glucose. Now the company says it has spent four years working on a blood sugar testing device, which sounds like a much bigger step. The obvious question is whether Huawei has figured out a way to do it without needles.

The comment came from Huawei Consumer Business Group CEO He Gang during a recruitment event at Peking University. He said Huawei plans to release the device and that the technology behind it took four years to get to a point the company considered acceptable and ready for industrialisation.

That is about as close as Huawei has come to saying something new is actually on the way. The problem is that He Gang stopped there, so we still don’t know what the device looks like, how it works or whether it is even something you wear on your wrist.

Non-invasive glucose monitoring?

The obvious guess is that Huawei is working on some kind of non-invasive glucose monitoring. We already have finger-prick meters and invasive continuous glucose monitors, so it would be a bit strange to spend four years on research just to come up with another version of something that already exists.

Huawei still hasn’t actually said that, though. Gang didn’t explain how the technology works, whether it tracks glucose continuously or even whether the device sits on the wrist. But reading between the lines, non-invasive sensing looks like the most likely direction.

A wearable also feels like the obvious fit. Huawei has been pushing harder into health features for years, and the latest Watch D3 already uses a tiny inflatable airbag in the strap to take proper oscillometric blood pressure readings.

So Huawei clearly isn’t afraid of building unusual hardware around health tracking. Whether this blood sugar device ends up as a watch, another type of wearable or something separate is still unknown, but a conventional glucose meter would be the least interesting explanation.

There have been hints before. A report in September 2025 claimed Huawei was developing an advanced blood sugar monitoring wearable for 2026, although that came from a Weibo tipster rather than Huawei itself. At the time there was very little to back it up.

Our takeaway

This week’s comment carries considerably more weight than previous rumours because it comes directly from the head of Huawei’s consumer business. It also changes the wording from something being researched to something Huawei plans to release.

Separately, a few Huawei watches can already assess a user’s risk of elevated blood sugar, but that system doesn’t measure an actual glucose value. The recently launched Watch GT 7 series, for example, supports high blood sugar risk assessment in compatible markets. But again, it isn’t a glucose monitor.

So this is one to keep an eye on. There is still plenty of room between ‘ready for industrialisation’ and a product sitting on a shop shelf. Regulatory approval would also become a major part of the story if Huawei intends to market the device as something that genuinely measures blood glucose.

Sources: IT Home, Huawei Support, Weibo, Huawei Central