In a June 30 patent, which AppleInsider first spotted, inventor Michael R. Brennan, a machine learning software engineer at Apple, describes a system to “automatically [determine] a user’s gesture and/or finger positions based on one or more properties of the user’s veins.”
The idea is to use an array of sensors, including an infrared camera, to capture images of the user’s hand to sort of diagram the veins’ positioning within a user’s hand. The device could then convert those images to a digital map that recognizes when a person makes different hand or finger movements, based on the changes in the veins.