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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

#51

Post by hu3 »

scarface_74 wrote: post #45
boringg wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And as a hypothetical sought after employee, how is that my problem? If another company wants to roll a shit ton of money up to my doorstep, why shouldn’t I take it? Should I be treating my employer “like family” and care about “the mission”?

It's about the company anti-competitive behaviour. No one said anything about the employees.

Re: Blood oxygen monitoring returning to Apple Watch in the US

#52

Post by do_not_redeem »

scarface_74 wrote: post #45
boringg wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And as a hypothetical sought after employee, how is that my problem? If another company wants to roll a shit ton of money up to my doorstep, why shouldn’t I take it? Should I be treating my employer “like family” and care about “the mission”?

As an employee you shouldn't care, but if you're someone who wants technological progress to continue, you should care whether companies with a slush fund of billions are able to bully those with less money.

Re: Blood oxygen monitoring returning to Apple Watch in the US

#53

Post by anonu »

sargun wrote: post #30

What's the US Customs ruling in question? > This update was enabled by a recent U.S. Customs ruling.

https://rulings.cbp.gov/ruling/H335304 maybe this - from January 2025

It appears the patent is for "User-Worn Device for Noninvasively Measuring a Physiological Parameter of a User". So Apple is simply moving the logic to a non user-worn device - like a phone - to get around the problem. (this is my quick read / conjecture)

Here is the original patent https://patents.google.com/patent/US10912502B2/en

Re: Blood oxygen monitoring returning to Apple Watch in the US

#54

Post by andrewmcwatters »

You can buy a fingertip pulse oximeter for like $10. I understand the benefits of having all of these biometric readers directly on your personal device, but the perceived stress over getting this back into the watch seems... I don't know, not wise? In poor taste? Something, but I can't articulate it well.

I mean, we don't have IR blasters on any of our personal devices anymore, and arguably it would be nice to be able to control my TV with my phone like I could with my Palm Pilot forever ago, but that's not in vogue anymore.

Re: Blood oxygen monitoring returning to Apple Watch in the US

#55

Post by Teever »

scarface_74 wrote: post #41
0cf8612b2e1e wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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?

Apple is able to do what they do now because of the shit they got away with in the Jobs era.

Because they hobbled competitors and innovation then they're able to do it now.

It's really hard to determine how detrimental their actions have been to the job market for software engineers.

It is entirely possible that every software engineer is worse off because Apple severely distorted the market and prevented many competitors from growing to be competitors to Apple and what ever offer Apple made to these people pales to what they could be making if Jobs hadn't done what he did.

Re: Blood oxygen monitoring returning to Apple Watch in the US

#56

Post by mauvehaus »

throwaway303293 wrote: post #31
neild wrote: post #29

In my experience, the Apple Watch blood oxygen monitoring was horribly inaccurate. It would report wildly variable results, often telling me that I had a blood oxygen level of 80% (which, if true, would indicate that I should be getting myself to an emergency room ASAP). Regular pulse oxygen meters are cheap and reliable.

In contrast my Garmin and finger pulseox match exactly.

I don't know what Garmin you have, but I'm about half convinced that my Instinct's heart rate measurement is implemented by a PRNG. It's frequently off by 50% from a count/time cross-check.

It does not inspire me to move up their range when this watch eventually dies: if they can't get the basic feature working, I have a hard time seeing how they're going to manage anything trickier.

Re: Blood oxygen monitoring returning to Apple Watch in the US

#57

Post by skadamou »

jeffbee wrote: post #46
neild wrote: post #29

In my experience, the Apple Watch blood oxygen monitoring was horribly inaccurate. It would report wildly variable results, often telling me that I had a blood oxygen level of 80% (which, if true, would indicate that I should be getting myself to an emergency room ASAP). Regular pulse oxygen meters are cheap and reliable.

Wouldn't you already be super dead with a true reading of 80? Or at least unable to cognitively interpret the reading?

That's definitely a danger zone for healthy people but interestingly enough people with things like COPD may have a blood oxygen level in the 80s and while that is indicative of the disease, they may be totally stable and may not even need oxygen [1].

[1] https://www.drugs.com/medical-answers/normal-oxygen-level-so...

Re: Blood oxygen monitoring returning to Apple Watch in the US

#58

Post by JustExAWS »

hu3 wrote: post #51
scarface_74 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And as a hypothetical sought after employee, how is that my problem? If another company wants to roll a shit ton of money up to my doorstep, why shouldn’t I take it? Should I be treating my employer “like family” and care about “the mission”?

It's about the company anti-competitive behaviour. No one said anything about the employees.

The company is being “anticompetitive” by offering someone more money? Should we now make that illegal too?

Re: Blood oxygen monitoring returning to Apple Watch in the US

#59

Post by JustExAWS »

do_not_redeem wrote: post #52
scarface_74 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And as a hypothetical sought after employee, how is that my problem? If another company wants to roll a shit ton of money up to my doorstep, why shouldn’t I take it? Should I be treating my employer “like family” and care about “the mission”?

As an employee you shouldn't care, but if you're someone who wants technological progress to continue, you should care whether companies with a slush fund of billions are able to bully those with less money.

You mean like the innovation that someone else here said that was denied a patent in Japan because of prior art?

We like software patents now?

Re: Blood oxygen monitoring returning to Apple Watch in the US

#60

Post by 361994752 »

llm_nerd wrote: post #34
neild wrote: post #29

In my experience, the Apple Watch blood oxygen monitoring was horribly inaccurate. It would report wildly variable results, often telling me that I had a blood oxygen level of 80% (which, if true, would indicate that I should be getting myself to an emergency room ASAP). Regular pulse oxygen meters are cheap and reliable.

Indeed, just generally this is a silly feature that was used to sell updated devices, but has almost no value to end users. There is shockingly little diagnostic value of the reading unless you are in such a critical state that you likely want something better than an incredibly unreliable and inaccurate smartwatch feature cram. For anyone remotely healthy, 100% of the time your real value will be between 95% and 99%…

as some one whose family passed away due to pneumonia, spo2 is a life saving feature if we had that back then. probably 99.9% of the time spo2 number is good enough. but the value is really about the left 0.1% . of course the false positive rate should be low enough.
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