Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Blood oxygen monitoring returning to Apple Watch in the US

apple.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 357 posts

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

#81

Post by JustExAWS »

lurk2 wrote: post #69
JustExAWS wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Acquisitions can be considered anticompetitive. The only thing that appears to differentiate this situation from an acquisition is that the investors didn’t get paid.

Are you suggesting that the FRC should step in when a company offers employment to a large number of employees at another company? How exactly would you propose to put this into law where it doesn’t hurt the employees?

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

#82

Post by OkayPhysicist »

gibolt wrote: post #19
OkayPhysicist wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

The company made a billion dollars in profit last year. I doubt Apple was willing to pay anywhere near that amount to hire an employee.

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

#83

Post by FirmwareBurner »

spogbiper wrote: post #16
thebruce87m wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds good for the employees, so go Apple?

Yes, very good for the employees. Apple even offered them 2x their salaries to leave Masimo.

Yes "very good", until Apple decides to mass-layoff them, because now, owning the valuable core IP and having killed their primary competitor in the field, Apple can do whatever they want and get away with it because those employees have nowhere else to go in the area. 200+ IQ move .

How people on HN can support monopolization of markets and killing of competition is beyond me, since in the end it always bites them in the ass (see recent mass layoffs in the industry), yet this lesson seems to be quickly forgotten.

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

#84

Post by tshaddox »

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.

This is the exact opposite of being anti-competitive.

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

#85

Post by boringg »

runako wrote: post #77
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.

Masimo was worth ~$16B when this was going down. They are worth $8B today. This is roughly the size of American Airlines. Masimo is not the biggest company, but they are a large publicly-traded company. The company does $2B in revenue and spends close to $800 million annually in sales, general and admin. This is over 3x their R&D budget. (For reference, Apple's R&D spend is higher than its SG&A spend.) Per levels.fyi…

Im not saying they pay them well or not. Theres just not a comparison on comp they could do. That you don't understand the power dynamics between that is something you will hopefully learn about the world as you become more experienced. Apple would just offer more at the end of the day.

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

#86

Post by sieabahlpark »

BugsJustFindMe wrote: post #8
brandonb wrote: post #2

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…

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.

[dead]

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

#87

Post by rblatz »

andrewmcwatters wrote: post #54

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 ab…

iPhone can control Apple TVs, and is able to detect which device you are nearest to and auto select it (if you have multiple)

Also all my TVs also have apps that function as a remote control.

Interestingly enough my main TV an LG has a remote that controls the tv using RF. I don’t even know if it would work with an IR blaster.

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

#88

Post by johnfn »

FirmwareBurner wrote: post #83
spogbiper wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, very good for the employees. Apple even offered them 2x their salaries to leave Masimo.

Yes "very good", until Apple decides to mass-layoff them, because now, owning the valuable core IP and having killed their primary competitor in the field, Apple can do whatever they want and get away with it because those employees have nowhere else to go in the area. 200+ IQ move . How people on HN can support monopolization of markets and killing of competition is beyond me, since in the end it always bites them i…

Is there evidence of Apple doing this in the past?

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

#89

Post by brandonb »

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.

The FDA standard for blood oxygen sensing is within 6% absolute, 95% of the time.

So variability in the sensing is pretty normal, and you want to look at long-term trends rather than individual measurements.

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

#90

Post by conradev »

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.

On their best days, they're accurate to within 2-4%. But so many things can trip up the reading, like melanin:

  As a result, for darker-skinned patients, oxygen saturation readings can read as normal when they are, in fact, dangerously low.
https://publichealth.jhu.edu/2024/pulse-oximeters-racial-bia...

When everyone starting looking at every percentage point of their SpO2 during COVID as if it were life or death, the FDA had to remind people of this:

https://www.fda.gov/news-events/fda-brief/fda-brief-fda-warn...

You would be unable to read an accurate pulse oximeter at 80% because you would have lost consciousness. Doctors have to worry about false negatives just as much as false positives with those things.

Post reply on HN