The Apple Watch has become a popular health and fitness monitoring tool in recent years, with features including a heart rate monitor, body temperature sensor, blood oxygen monitoring, and women’s health tracking. However, despite a growing feature set, the watch does have one notable omission: blood glucose monitoring.

According to data from the World Health Organization, around 422 million people worldwide have diabetes. Currently, the disease is monitored using a finger-prick test to measure glucose levels or by attaching patches to the skin.

Apple is now reportedly close to adding a non-invasive glucose monitoring solution to its watches after testing various technologies for the best part of a decade. However, it could still be a few years before the device is ready for mass-market application.

If Apple’s monitoring sensors get the green light from medical professionals, its smartwatches could also be used to screen users for pre-diabetic indicators, as well as help long-term sufferers to manage their condition without the pain and inconvenience of skin-prick testing.

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Apple will use a chip-based solution called “silicon photonics” to measure glucose levels, combined with absorption spectroscopy, which measures reflected light to gauge insulin. Although the technology hasn’t yet been peer-reviewed by scientists, the Cupertino company is thought to be deep into the proof-of-concept stage of testing.

Once Apple’s technology has been evaluated by researchers, the company will have to work on reducing the size of the chips, as experts believe that early prototypes are still too large to fit into the compact frame of a smartwatch.