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Apple was in a patent dispute over this feature with Massimo. Their workaround is to calculate blood oxygen on the iPhone, using the sensors from Apple Watch.

The Apple Watch hardware is otherwise the same. The back of the watch shines light of a specific wavelength into your skin and measures the reflected light. Heart rate sensing uses green (525 nm) and infrared (850–940 nm) light; blood oxygen sensing added a red light at 660 nm in 2020.

The iPhone will now calculate the ratio of absorbed red to infrared light, then apply calibration constants from experimental data to estimate blood oxygen saturation.

More detailed writeup on how the technology works is here: https://www.empirical.health/metrics/oxygen/

6 comments

Software patents are a scourge.

I would be a bit more sympathetic if this was not about a trillion dollar company who poached some employees rather than engage in a licensing deal.

25 employees including the CTO, and then bought a building nearby to Masimo's office for them to work in. At least according to the CEO of Masimo in public statements. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RR1o8EoW-Eg

Doesn't sound like the bad part to me.

If Masimo wanted to, they'd have offered them the same or more to keep them, but they didn't. I don't believe an employer has any right to expect other companies not to offer positions to their employees. Employees should not be kept in the dark on opportunities for better pay and conditions because you can't or don't want to fight that offer.

Sounds good for the employees, so go Apple?

It's time for Cook to cook out really

Why would they license something that was invented 50+ years ago? No one else pays a license for it. Not even valid patent as the company couldn't prove it court it was a valid patent and the case ended up being hung jury with all but one jury that held out. Only reason they couldn't import it because

Travesty is the ITC is allowed to block imports without going to court. Banning imports shouldn't be done by some government institution and should be handled by the court system.

It's really easy to avoid your employees being "poached": treat them well, and pay them better.

Wow you must work for a company with incredibly deep pockets. No way can massimo compete on salary with apple. Only people in the game who can do that are google facebook apple chatgpt etc.

that doesn't work when Apple can pay them multiples "more well".

the sensible thing would be to license the tech

- is what Tim Cook told himself to vanquish the last bit of uneasiness. Then he took of his glasses, set them on the night stand, and slept better than he had in years.

Absolutely. Similarly, I tell parents who keep whining about soaring education costs and employability: Educate them well, and get them high paying jobs.

I generally agree, but the company likely doesn't have those funds. Considering the largest player (Apple) stands to make way more from it than you and just works around your patent.

Not arguing Apple shouldn't poach, just that your suggestion doesn't work.

yes, and ribcage should be mesh-gridded if it did not want to be knifed, Right?

Or just collude with your rival companies ala Steve Jobs.

They were "poached" or the employees negotiated their value?

"anti-poaching" is how big tech companies described their anti-competitive agreements [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...

They were very clearly poached. They were chosen for their specific knowledge of a product Apple wanted to make and Apple (being one of the wealthiest companies in Silicon Valley and ever) was able to throw out whatever number to get what they wanted. They even put them in an office near their old job.

This isn't a case of "they went looking for a better job". Have you done zero reading on this story?

I don't how can you patent "read sensor, and process readings on device" I get if how it's actual sensor was patented, not "read and compute"

And then let their product lose the feature for multiple years rather than settling for some amount of money that was absolutely trivial to them.

Poaching employees is a good thing and should always be allowed. Companies have the means to prevent this at any time. It's called contract employment. But if they insist on being able to fire me at any time, they can eat the downside of that too.

> I would be a bit more sympathetic if this was not about a trillion dollar company who poached some employees rather than engage in a licensing deal.

Obviously the people who suffer are customers. There isn't a single instance where IP helps them.

I hate the word “poaching”. A company offered employees more money in exchange for their labor.

I see no issue. Would you have preferred what happened in the Jobs era where 7 of the largest tech firms colluded not to hire from each other’s company?

Wow. So you view corporate employees like serfs bound to the land, not allowed to seek better opportunities for themselves? That’s kind of… dark.

Every workaround I've seen for the past 30 years feel like a "Shabbat elevator" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shabbat_elevator) I'm not using the elevator because I'm not pushing the button because it's always moving.

Edit: I've always hated patents too, don't get me wrong.

I dont think the patent in question is for software: https://patents.google.com/patent/US10912502B2/en

The whole concept of software patents is a hack; as I understand it algorithms as a rule cannot be patented, so the system running the algorithm is patented instead. This seems to illustrate the absurdity of that workaround.

IMHO, the problem is that if you are wealthy enough then you don't need to worry about patents. I also think these patents are, on the whole, not great. But here the one company legally got the patent and the another, richer company hired away their talent and paid them to find a workaround to avoid licensing. Smaller companies will continue to license the patent.

Few tears will be shed for Massimo (or Qualcomm) but the next victim could be a much smaller company, maybe one that would be more of a competitor. I don't like the current patent regime but I do believe enforcement should apply to everyone, not just players who lack the money to rig the game.

It's a patent on a physical process for measuring blood oxygen. It's not a software patent.

Isn't this hardware though? :-)

Crazy that this is a 'patent'. We did this experiment in high school 30 years ago.

almost as crazy as a patent for a rectangle with rounded corners

Design patents are a form of trademark with a silly name, not real patents.

You can also patent the shape of a bottle. https://patents.google.com/patent/USD48160S/en (yes, its an old one).

These fall into the classification of design patent which covers ornamental non-functional elements of a particular item. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_patent

Design patents also cover typefaces. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property_protecti... -- note that typefaces cannot be copyrighted in the United States

Design patents differ from a utility patent which covers how something works.

You mean a Squircle®

That's of course not what the patent was about.

I've just been amazed how many things could be a patent and why I haven't spent time to learn.

Phenomenal that the patent is only violated by doing it with the watch cpu but not by funneling the data to a separate cpu. The surest sign that it's a bullshit patent.

They're all like that. Patents are pretty specific.

If they're not very specific there's frequently prior art.

Someone else linked the patent in question and it seems to be about a wearable device. The iphone is carried on your person and not worn as part of the same device, as I understand it.

I still don't think it's a valid patent.

I wonder if they could take it one step further. Do the measurements on the watch, do the calculation on the iPhone, send the results back to the watch for display. Technically all the work is done on the iPhone and the watch is just the IO device.

According to the link, the patents in question expire in 2028.

> The iPhone will now calculate the ratio of absorbed red to infrared light, then apply calibration constants from experimental data to estimate blood oxygen saturation.

Sorry, maybe I missed it - but source for this?

It's in the Apple PR https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/08/an-update-on-blood-ox...

> sensor data from the Blood Oxygen app on Apple Watch will be measured and calculated on the paired iPhone

The literal article that is the sole focus of this entire thread?