Blood oxygen monitoring returning to Apple Watch in the US
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Re: Blood oxygen monitoring returning to Apple Watch in the US
#2Apple 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/
Re: Blood oxygen monitoring returning to Apple Watch in the US
#3Apple 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…
Software patents are a scourge.
Re: Blood oxygen monitoring returning to Apple Watch in the US
#4Apple 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…
> 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?
Re: Blood oxygen monitoring returning to Apple Watch in the US
#5Apple 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…
> 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
Re: Blood oxygen monitoring returning to Apple Watch in the US
#6Apple 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…
Crazy that this is a 'patent'. We did this experiment in high school 30 years ago.
Re: Blood oxygen monitoring returning to Apple Watch in the US
#7Apple 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…
Crazy that this is a 'patent'. We did this experiment in high school 30 years ago.
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Re: Blood oxygen monitoring returning to Apple Watch in the US
#8Apple 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…
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.
Re: Blood oxygen monitoring returning to Apple Watch in the US
#9Apple 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…
Software patents are a scourge.
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.
Re: Blood oxygen monitoring returning to Apple Watch in the US
#10Massimo invented this technology (yay Massimo!) in the 90s yet their Japanese patents [1] weren't considered prior art (WTF?) because of technical legal reasons.
[1] https://patents.google.com/patent/JP2002542493A5/en%EF%BF%BC
So I suppose if Massimo is going to use a technical legality to extend then Apple can use a technical legality to avoid.