They do not. Massimo's relevant patents have to do with their signal processing on user-worn devices. Cheap oximeters are clip-ons that only do rudimentary processing with strong beams of light through the fingers.
Patent laws really are so strange. Two people had an idea in 1989 (over a decade before I was born) and as a result, I am not allowed to build a product using that idea and sell it, even if I independently reached the idea myself. I think in an ideal world, we would have intellectual rights and patents, but for a vastly reduced scope of time.
You come up with an amazing breakthrough that will alter the world? Congratulations, it's yours for 10 years to do what you want. After that, it's fair game. Innovate or die.
> You come up with an amazing breakthrough that will alter the world? Congratulations, it's yours for 10 years to do what you want. After that, it's fair game. Innovate or die.
That’s how patents work in the US. You get 10 years with the ability to extend 10 more. There are games to be played with some patents that extend their life (like a new use patent in pharma) but generally these parents for seemingly old things are new ideas about an old thing.
If you want a short fun read on Solar Panels [0] you’ll find a Melvin Severy referenced. That’s my ancestor. We don’t see a penny from his work because that patent is long gone and is just referenced as prior art. Feel free to use it all you’d like.
I would argue intellectual property laws are bad at the outset, and that the concept of intellectual property is praxeologically unsound. What right does a person have to restrict the progress and free will of another (or society for that matter) simply because they came up with an idea "first"?
The very idea of intellectual property though, you own your mind, you own your thoughts, sure. You can own a document with the details of your idea, and you can physically restrict others from seeing your property. What does it mean for an idea to be property though? Why are government resources invested in protecting something that private companies and individuals have the responsibility of protecting themselves?
> Why are government resources invested in protecting something that private companies and individuals have the responsibility of protecting themselves?
How can an individual protect themselves if a big company steals their ideas?
They cant under the current system, and I see no reason for that to change.
They might have marginally more protection over their ideas than a than a big company can due to leaks, but I dont fundamentally believe that ideas should be protected under the law, assuming a just legal system. I'll break this into 2 parts.
I don't think governments have a great track record of protecting interests, and a theory why. Whatever political system we have, power will centralize in an elite that uses it for their own purposes. Slavery in America was not funded on its merit, it was in fact heavily subsidized at the expense of working americans and the states were turned into fortresses to imprison the slaves. This occured under an arguement that the government should protect private interests. Whatever power you give the government, the elite will steal; an aside, even when the elites are killed in places like russia during the soviet revolution, it was at the behest of a newer and much darker elite; anyways, a corrupt intellectual property system, because government power is prone to capture.
I disagree with the concept that ideas can be owned, as opposed to merely possessed. Allow me to cast abducto absurdum on this, taken to its logical conclusion, does this idea create absurd results? If we were chronically dehydrated in africa, and I figured out how to make a pump to get water, and im willing to make more pumps for trade, would it be reasonable that the rest of the village is going to die of dehydration because you, fully capable of recreating and innovating on the design, were instead bound by intellectual property laws? If that is in fact absurd, then I would like to know what the line is and why.
The international TRIPs agreement, managed by WTO, specifies a 20y term. AFAIK, 20y is standard for patents. Which means an invention (not an idea!) patented in 1989 should be free to use from 2009 onwards.
USA used to have 'submarine patents' that could appear later, but apart from that there doesn't seem to be any jurisdiction in which a 33 year old patent would still be valid.
Some ideas (especially software) move quickly, and you can implement them in an afternoon. Others, like nuclear power, can take ten years just to break ground on construction. It would probably be quite discouraging to innovation in heavy industry if patent protection expired before the first mover could even launch a product.
Your second paragraph is how patents already work, and you can't patent an idea, only specific inventions. Sometimes patents for ideas slip through the cracks and sometimes patents get extended without a good reason, but these are not problems with the idea of a patent itself.
What you're arguing against is corruption, not patents.
But the amount of processing necessary to trigger the patent is "any amount more than zero". Here's what claim 19, which Apple was adjudged to have indirectly violated, says about processing:
> [the user-worn device comprising, among other things: ] one or more processors configured to receive one or more signals from at least one of the four photodiodes and output measurements responsive to the one or more signals, the measurements indicative of the oxygen saturation of the user.
So if your device includes one or more processors, and those processors aren't just decorative, you're in violation. What processing you do is not relevant; what's patented is that you do any processing of any kind.
Note that Apple's violation does not seem to have been related to data processing; they were adjudged to have directly violated claim 22, which is the device described in claim 19 plus a series of modifications and/or clarifications, of which the modification/clarification unique to claim 22 has to do with the configuration of the LEDs in the device.
If the problem had to do with their data processing, they probably would have been found in violation of claim 19 instead...?
It's funny how these things work. They don't even specify the wavelength of the LEDs used, instead preferring to patent any wavelength imaginable. But obviously not all of them will work. Why was this allowed in a patent? How is this a valid description of what they built?
Why wouldn't it be allowed in a patent? As far as I know, there isn't a law that says patents have to specify the wavelengths used.
If you built it with wavelengths that worked, it'd be covered by the patent. If you built it with wavelengths that didn't work, it'd probably be useless.
The independent claims in that patent seem to exactly describe technologies from the 1970’s, except that the detector is flat and uses 4 LEDs. The Massimo page you cite claims they invented their signal processing technique in 1989, and Wikipedia says they shipped it in 1995.
The patent you cite was filed in 2009, and is set to expire in 2028. Patents only are supposed to last 17 years in the US, not 39 years.
Anyway, the clip on one’s probably don’t use the algorithms from 1989 or and whatever is in the patent, since the innovation was using a flat detector instead of a clip. Clips were working fine for 20 years before SET.
Clips work by observing transmission of light through the finger being absorbed by oxygen-carrying blood as opposed to the single chip wearable which depends on measuring reflected light. Different techniques, different patents.
> 22. The user-worn device of claim 21, wherein the plurality of emitters comprise at least four emitters, and wherein each of the plurality of emitters comprises a respective set of at least three LEDs.
> 28. [This is one of the base descriptions; too long to pull as a quote.]
> 12. The user-worn device of claim 8, wherein the physiological parameter comprises oxygen or oxygen saturation.
> 24. The user-worn device of claim 20, wherein the protrusion comprises opaque material configured to substantially prevent light piping.
> 30. The user-worn device of claim 20, wherein the protrusion further comprises one or more chamfered edges.
The easiest way to avoid this set of patents appears to be to use less than three LEDs. I assume that will produce a more unreliable reading, but increasing the number of LEDs does not appear to be considered an "obvious" approach to that problem.
More than four would increase cost and wouldn’t necessarily be more accurate. I believe each LED emits Red, Blue or Infrared.
But these Apple Watches are not approved by the FDA as medical devices and are less accurate than a pulse oxomiter. Even FitBit doesn’t try to fool anyone.
So what’s the real market to add in measuring oxygen levels? Wellness? You have to not move to use it and we already know the measurements are not accurate.
Feels like they added it to sell more watches and seems like they really bought the farm this time
Or trifling matters like clips working on an entirely different principle (transmission vice reflection) than the method which remains patent encumbered.
Certainly it works on a different principle than that which is patented. At the same time, IANAL, and if the stakes are large enough the question might need an adjudicated answer.
Adjudicated answers, also known as patents, have been separately issued for these very different techniques to accomplish the same underlying goal. The transmission patents are expired for quite sometime however, which is why devices using them can be made cheaply.
Not really. $15 pulse oximeters on Amazon are coming straight out of China from fly by night companies in a country that doesn't particularly care about IP law, and even when they do make it amazingly hard for a foreign company with even the most absolute, solid, novel patents to fight against a Chinese company blatantly and openly infringing.
Trying to frame this as a money grab from Masimo is overly defensive of Apple.
None of these pulse oximeters on Amazon from China are violating these worn device patents because those pulse oximeters don't use an array of emitters, and heavily process the reflected light results. Wearable pulse ox is an entirely different tech stack as finger clamp pulse ox.
Yeah finger clamps shine through the finger completely. They don't use reflected light.
They are much more accurate for this reason but also more annoying to wear. I think the only daily-wearable one that works this way is the Oura ring.
I'm surprised how well it still works on a watch though. I never tried Apple's implementation as I don't have an apple phone to pair it with, but my galaxy watch 6's SpO2 works pretty decently compared to a finger clamp one, considering it is much harder to do it on the wrist.
https://www.masimo.com/technology/co-oximetry/set/
https://patents.google.com/patent/US10912502B2/en (this is one that was cited by the trade commission.)