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Comment by kstrauser | Hacker News Reader

We’ve had pulse oximeters for decades. What’s specific to this company’s implementation?

Here's the patent:

https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/patents/patent/US-10945648...

Read this pattern through Google (they have PDFs provided), isn’t it describing the finger sensor pretty much every health care provider uses? Especially the figures they put in, non of them looks like a consumer daily device.

Not a typical pattern troll but an innovative one. Now they can pretty much go after any companies in this area! I feel they are after Apple just because Apple Watch succeeded.

Yeah, I'd really love to see some commentary from someone with experience in the medical device industry about whether there's anything novel in the patent. It was originally filed in 2008, but that was thirty years after Minolta made the first fingertip pulse oximetry sensor. They might be using different wavelengths of light, but Apple could be as well.

Everyone saying "there's nothing new here" : there's a whole body of law governing how this is decided. You can be 100% certain that Apple's lawyers are exploiting it to the max.

But simply asserting that is not going to change the outcome any.

> I feel they are after Apple just because Apple Watch succeeded.

Exactly. Why would they sue an unsuccessful company with no money?

>The present disclosure relates to noninvasive methods, devices, and systems for measuring various blood constituents or analytes, such as glucose. In an embodiment, a light source comprises LEDs and super-luminescent LEDs. The light source emits light at least wavelengths of about 1610 nm, about 1640 nm, and about 1665 nm.

Since when is the Apple watch measureing glucose? It appears they are not fighting about something the was in the original scope of the patent but something that was added/emphasized later.

Difficult to pick sides here.

Massimo was/is the incumbent in their medical space and they are now, to some extend, being disrupted by a consumer-market focused company. Of course they need to defend their territory. On the other hand, this is also not the first instance where Apple is accused of predatory behavior towards potential suppliers.

> Since when is the Apple watch measureing glucose?

the patent says, "various blood constituents or analytes"

oxygen is a constituent, oxygenation is an analyte, just as an example

the word you're quoting, "glucose" appears after the term "such as", which means "possibly including, and not limited to", so this isn't the gotcha you may think it is

If you can’t implement a patent without spending millions of dollars on R&D filling in the blanks it isn’t an invention. This was an idea, and it shouldn’t have been granted a patent. *IMO NAL

You mean like this one filed in 2004?

https://patents.google.com/patent/US20060026535A1/en

(Spoiler: Apple's patent for touch UI years before iPhone came to market, and the illustration indicates more of a iPad-like device)

Many more similar, also years before the products came to market:

https://patents.google.com/?assignee=apple

Patenting a UI layout is even more rediculous. These companies are retracing the arbitrary decisions made to solve a problem, then widening the parameters to cover all possible solutions in a vague patent to use as a legal landmine for any competition that might wander into the same sector.

Looks pretty bogus, almost all claims are dependent on claim 1, which wasn't novel:

> 1) A user interface method, comprising: detecting a touch; determining a user interface mode when a touch is detected; displaying one or more GUI elements based on the user interface mode; and enabling the functionality of the GUI element.

The term you're after is "reasonable experimentation."

The idea is: if a "lab assistant" can determine the exact concentrations, temperatures, pressures, manufacturing steps, etc. then it is still an invention. In other words, it's ok if practicing it requires reasonable experimentation.

You might disagree with that, but that's what the law says.

The USPTO page on enablement is filled with examples of hardware and software patents that were rejected, because of hand-waving generalization. There needs to be some accountability for approving these bogus patents.

https://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/mpep/s2164.html

Actually, no. Reexamination requests are based on 102 and 103, not 112.

But yeah: accountability. The PTO makes money by granting them, and then makes more by hearing the challenges to them.

Edit: I forgot to mention that the PTO runs a profit, last I checked. The government takes it, so they don't get to use it for improvement.

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