Blood oxygen monitoring returning to Apple Watch in the US
apple.com
apple.com
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/
If Masimo wanted to, they'd have offered them the same or more to keep them, but they didn't. I don't believe an employer has any right to expect other companies not to offer positions to their employees. Employees should not be kept in the dark on opportunities for better pay and conditions because you can't or don't want to fight that offer.
That said, a patent whose primary claim seems to be (based on the workaround) _where_ the processing takes place (ant not _how_) seems like exactly the kinda thing that shouldn‘t be patentable.
Didn't Apple settle an anti-poaching lawsuit?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
What makes you believe this? The definition of “poach” is not intrinsically linked to the notion of ownership/property.
The word has several definitions, one of which describes a method of preparing eggs (and others that clearly distinguish between things like illegally killing animals, hiring practices, etc).
It doesn’t make sense to me to take the definition that has nothing to do with employment and attach the weight/meaning of that unrelated definition to hiring practices.
Put another way, it would be silly to say “poaching is a horrible term to use for this because it implies that employees are eggs that can be cooked and eaten”. I find the consternation about hiring terminology here to be about the same.
I mean, get that money, but don't expect that you can make a career out of being poached repeatedly. If you're really that good, you probably could have done better working for yourself.
What’s meaningful is that Apple was hiring them because of the work they did for Massimo and doing so en masse at a single point of time.
If they had just hired experts on blood monitoring to staff a team and some of them happened to be working for Massimo before, it would just be hiring as usual and not described as poaching.
Abuse of the patent system can be deeply problematic. This is not one of them. This is one of the richest company in the world stealing the work paid by another.
Employees aren't animals in the forest where the king has the sole right to hunt them for sport.
And when this is done for the sole purpose of acquiring a specific kind of talent - especially to build exactly the same thing - it’s called poaching.
The word “poach” is used in numerous ways and describes many things that have nothing to do with hunting for sport [0]. I think it’s a bit problematic to hold on to a singular definition here that clearly does not apply to the situation.
- [0] https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/poach
Whether you like this or not, the practice of hiring employees specifically to work on the same thing elsewhere or to drain a company of its talent - is called poaching.
It’s often legal, but can be controversial especially when it’s a behemoth raiding smaller shops.
You seem to be offended by the word itself, but it’s just a useful descriptor to differentiate between different types of hiring scenarios.
I’ve been poached before, and it worked out great for me.
if your IP is just lines on a patent you dont really have much moat in the first place.
Tomorrow's innovations in consumer electronics won't get funding as investors balk at the risk of getting Massimo'd.
>How HN can support monopolization of markets and killing of [sic] competition is beyond me.
That suggests HN is a monoculture of some sort of united front. It is not. Diversity of opinion is best for this community (and all communities).
And, sorry, what competition was killed off here? I, as the consumer, was never considering Massimo for my blood oxygen measurement needs. I bought an Apple Watch and just want it to be as feature-full as possible. So does Apple.
I wasn’t going to buy a device just for blood monitoring. What they produced is valuable to me as a feature of a product but not as a product in of itself
It’s sort of like having your watch tell you whether you slept well or not. Didn’t you already know? If you think you slept well and your watch disagrees, are you going to trust its opinion over your own?
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.
Massimo still owns the core IP. Apple owns some other IP.
> How people on HN can support monopolization of markets
There was one niche (note: still massive) provider of this technology. Now there are two, one of which is mass. Even if that collapses to one mass, that’s objectively better. More competitors and more consumer surplus is not a monopoly condition.
There is a difference between being reflexively anti-Apple regardless of the circumstances and being pro-monopoly.
Their (limited) levels.fyi data does not indicate this is one of their goals.
Licensed Mac clones were only available for two years (1995-1997), and discontinuing the program drove many other companies out of business, so it's hard to see how the change was a ploy to acquire a single company's assets. It seems more likely that Jobs discontinued licensing because it caused Apple to lose money.
And it looks like much of the Exponential Technologies team continued under a different name, then was bought by Apple in 2010 for $121 million.[1]
If there are other examples, can you provide one that is more recent and/or more blatant?
1. https://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/28/technology/28apple.html
I would bet Apple, and the other large publicly listed tech companies, have lifted far more employees into financial independence from employers than any other business in history.
So doing monopolistic and illegal things is OK because it makes some people rich?
They've also destroyed financial independence. They've engaged in anti-competitive and anti-poaching practices before. There's several famous examples.
Anyways, are you saying it's Apple's goal to lift employees in this way, or does it just happen to be incidental to whatever their CEO wants at the moment?
Also all the people actually _making_ those devices, surely the largest labor pool supporting their business, have zero financial independence. That's the typical western blind spot.
> from employers than any other business in history
I think that'd be the US Government and it's GI Bill. Okay, technically not a business, but if the virtue is independence, then it shouldn't matter who provided it.
Probably a net-negative.
If in their world view "best developer salary is not always the best thing" one could have better reasoning for supporting little guy Massimo getting crushed by Apple.
The employees made out better - good for them. That's a lot easier to do when you have a market cap 400 times higher than that of the company you made all these promises to, and then left holding the bag.
One of the biggest pain points I have had with the 'smartphone revolution' post Android/iOS is that almost every wearable/pocketable is a watch. nobody's trying new formats that could be useful!
https://patents.google.com/patent/US10912502B2/
They were hired for their expertise. Do you want to start enforcing non competes in California?
But it was cheaper to Apple to just hire a few key people and screwing over everyone else.
Good or bad depends on how Massimo compare to Apple. Which one of the two offers the most growth potential. If Apple just keep the employees long enough to steal the tech before laying the off, not building on it, then it is terrible for all but Apple shareholders. If Apple "saved" these employees from an exploitative company, providing the with growth potential and further development then it is a good thing.
So good for the employees, but I wouldn't be applauding Apple for their outright deceptions here.
Travesty is the ITC is allowed to block imports without going to court. Banning imports shouldn't be done by some government institution and should be handled by the court system.
There is a market rate for talent, and if you can't afford the market rate, then you don't get the talent.
A better way to give employees a share of the profits is to give them shares of the company. But then that also comes at the expense of compensation in dollars. You cannot pay for groceries with company shares.
People really like the idea of "When you win, I get money, when you lose, you lose money". Explained like that they agree it's bad, but explained like "Companies should be distributing profits to workers" they fall over themselves about how good of an idea it is.
Running a business is a gamble and like gambling, you need to put skin in the game to get a share of winnings (and lose your skin in the losses). People are just hyper-focused on the winners.
If company X is making a profit and losing employees to a competitor paying more, then company X has effectively chosen to let that happen. They don’t get to complain that they ate their cake and don’t have it anymore.
It's not bad, it's a cost.
You obviously wouldn't make a deal like that in isolation. You also wouldn't give someone a salary for nothing. But a cost like that can be worth paying just like a salary is worth paying. (Obviously you'd have limits on the numbers, just like salary is limited.)
Should I be treating my employer “like family” and care about “the mission”?
And even if you do look at this like an acquisition, acquisitions are almost always not anticompetitive.
But you are coming awfully close to advocating for non competes which is explicitly not allowed in CA.
It seems like Masimo wasn’t bullied because they had less money. They decided to run to the government to protect them instead of doing actual competition
We like software patents now?
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, Masimo is paying senior SDEs in HCOL $150k. They could 10x the comp to these critical employees without it being more than a rounding error in their numbers. (I don't think they would have had to go to 10x. Most people would practically tattoo a brand on themselves for a one-time bonus of $1m.)
Long story short: Masimo does indeed have the money to compete on salary with Apple for this set of employees. They chose to spend the money on attorneys instead.
Some companies don't value engineers. That often works, until they end up in an engineering competition against companies that do value engineers.
My core point is is that Masimo has far more than enough money to pay strategic employees enough money to keep them. Again, I doubt they would have to go as high as $5m/year for each of the relevant engineers. Masimo could spend that without making a major dent in their finances.
Could Apple up the ante and make offers of $5B/yr to each engineer? Sure, but we are likely talking about the difference between Masimo offering $150k and Apple offering $500k. These are numbers any public company can afford.
[1]. https://www.masimo.com/products/monitors/masimo-w1-medical-w...
It was literally described in the page you referenced: "Arm your patients with continuous measurements in a comfortable, lifestyle-friendly wearable—helping you deliver a true telemonitoring experience."
> automates the collection of clinically accurate measurements to help support: -Post-surgical recovery -Chronic care -Patient management
I say "was" because it was possible to buy it as a consumer, but there's still no direct competition, as:
"Please note that all Masimo consumer products have been discontinued. These include:
MightySat® Masimo W1® Sport Watch Opioid Halo™ / Masimo SafetyNet Alert™ Radius T°® Continuous Thermometer Masimo Stork® Vitals, Masimo Stork Vitals+, and Masimo Stork Baby Monitor"
Could Apple go higher? Sure, but again most people who like their jobs are not going to leave once their needs are met.
From a competitive standpoint: Masimo has lost $8B in market cap during this kerfuffle. It's entirely possible it would have been rational for Masimo to pay these employees higher than Apple possibly would go in order to not lose those billions in value.
the sensible thing would be to license the tech
Not arguing Apple shouldn't poach, just that your suggestion doesn't work.
https://companiesmarketcap.com/masimo/earnings/
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/MASI/masimo/net-in...
"anti-poaching" is how big tech companies described their anti-competitive agreements [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
This isn't a case of "they went looking for a better job". Have you done zero reading on this story?
Obviously the people who suffer are customers. There isn't a single instance where IP helps them.
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 has a massive war chest they can leverage to crush competition in several ways. As a nation and as consumers, we should at least be wary of what they're doing and whether it stifles competition or innovation. Even if the actions are legal.
There's a difference between Apple paying more for engineers in general vs Apple specifically targeting a competitor, acquiring all the talent from that competitor, then using the IP that talent brought to roll out substantially the same product.
Every company that proactively reaches out to an employed individual is doing so because that employee has demonstrated elsewhere and probably at their current job skills and experience that they find valuable and I assume is willing to make a better offer for them.
Other posters said that Masimo was paying developers $140K - $180k. That’s a nothingburger for good developers. The BigTech company I was working for two years ago was offering returning interns about that much in cash + liquid RSUs
I once worked for a startup where everyone loved the CTO, the startup got acquired after I left by a PE company.
When he left to be the CTO of another company in the same vertical, 10 of the employees followed him within the next six months basically taking all of the developers and sales that he wanted and all of the worthwhile staff from the startup. I assume it was for more money.
If I had still been at the startup when he left, he would have easily “poached” me too?
Should that also have been illegal? Was that unethical?
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.
How is all Apple’s fault? And are you really saying that the iPhone wouldn’t have happened if Apple hadn’t gotten into these agreements?
In your alternate universe would Nokia or Rim (who wasn’t involved in the agreement) still been relevant?
That collusion between these big companies to deny their employees a wage driven by free markets allowed those companies to accrue wealth and prevent competition from forming.
That's terrible for their employees, that's terrible for the consumer.
Alternatively, if hypothetically without the collusion do you think the upper wage pressure would I have materially affected those companies bottom lines to not create the products that made them profitable?
And you're right, there's a distinct possibility the savings that they made in breaking the law could have affected their bottom line at the time in a way that prevented them from making certain products, but it could have also fostered creativity and innovation in the companies that colluded, and increased competition between them and the new companies that would have formed in a way that would have benefited innovation.
What's important is that companies don't break the law and that people are paid as much as they're worth so that they can in turn stimulate the economy in ways that they see fit.
But now are you also saying that Apple did the right thing when they paid Masimo’s employees more so now they can stimulate the economy and in the future start companies?
Edit: I've always hated patents too, don't get me wrong.
Few tears will be shed for Massimo (or Qualcomm) but the next victim could be a much smaller company, maybe one that would be more of a competitor. I don't like the current patent regime but I do believe enforcement should apply to everyone, not just players who lack the money to rig the game.
These fall into the classification of design patent which covers ornamental non-functional elements of a particular item. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_patent
Design patents also cover typefaces. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property_protecti... -- note that typefaces cannot be copyrighted in the United States
Design patents differ from a utility patent which covers how something works.
I still don't think it's a valid patent.
Sorry, maybe I missed it - but source for this?
> sensor data from the Blood Oxygen app on Apple Watch will be measured and calculated on the paired iPhone
Regular pulse oxygen meters are cheap and reliable.
As a result, for darker-skinned patients, oxygen saturation readings can read as normal when they are, in fact, dangerously low.
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.
There’s a chart somewhere in there on mean sleep so2 by elevation
So variability in the sensing is pretty normal, and you want to look at long-term trends rather than individual measurements.
Out of curiosity, which band do you use?
I’ve found the sensor to give stable results, with repeated measurements always within 2 percentage points.
And the results give qualitatively very reasonable data when I sleep at high altitude. The readings have a clear dependence on the elevation.
I haven’t cross checked against other meters, but my Apple Watch 9 sensor gives stable and reasonable results that match expected altitude trends. So yeah it may not be tuned to a wide enough variety of wrist types.
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.
That guy is a great reference, and through his videos you can find various measures where he compares devices against reference devices (e.g. the Polar H10 for heart rate for instance). A lot of the reliability of these devices relies upon a tight fit as well.
I really use the hell out of it. Yeah I can't play solitaire like an iWatch, but the battery lasts 7 days in the backcountry, the flashlight is unbelievably handy while hiking/camping/boondocking, and it helps me be healthy with all of the data. Being able to trigger my inReach is also a nice touch. It's definitely a tool rather than a fashion piece.
For anyone remotely healthy, 100% of the time your real value will be between 95% and 99%, and there is almost no diagnostic value to it. Heart rate is actually interesting and is something you can learn from and work towards. SpO2 is just "eh...neat".
Sure, but if the value is less than 95, that does have diagnostic value (if it's accurate)
It's like heralding a G-sensor in your watch telling you that you're falling. It's likely pretty obvious already.
I've got enough mild asthma around me that we have a finger pulseox (or two cause we "lost" one and found it later) and I've started yelling at sick people to check it once in a while. Cause they don't usually think to, but sometimes it lingers and by the time they decide to go into an office, the numbers are pretty low.
Of course, we're not on the Apple bandwagon and stopped wearing watches once we got used to having pocket watches again.
[1] https://www.drugs.com/medical-answers/normal-oxygen-level-so...
Normal in humans is definitely relative and medicine has tended to assume that if we average 1000 humans (in too many cases, 1000 white college age men) that's what human normal is, which is crazy even beyond obvious problems like " people normally have 1.999 legs apparently".
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_high_altitude_on_hu...
> This update was enabled by a recent U.S. Customs ruling.
I can't find the ruling in question, though, so I'm not sure what they mean.
They are explicitly not to maximize the number of people who can benefit from a product in the short term, but precisely to limit it so the inventor can make more money.
The idea being that in the long run the inventions it incentivizes outweigh the people who are limited from benefiting in the short term.
Judges aren't in the position to weigh societal benefits in each individual patent case. Your framing implies that cost-benefit tradeoff. But that's not how it works. The only question is whether a product infringes or not.
By that same logic, my landlord's interests and ownership of his property are categorically less important than allowing his tenants access to their apartments.
Which is, like, a way to structure a society, but is not the way that American society is structured.
Here in America this is part of our culture: your health gimmeck features are precisely meaningless to the court if the prosecution can prove wreckless harm on Apple's behalf.
Apple pays tons of patent fees in all sorts of areas so tons of companies. They just thought this company was small enough that they could bully them into not having to pay. When that failed, they tried to crush them and force their hand.
While I'm against software patents on principle, Apple acting like some kind of stereotypical 80s movie evil corporation infuriates me just as much.
I have a real finger-based one bought during COVID that I trust more.
I believe a firm in Uk holds a patent for it and Apple has partnered with them a while ago.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/apple-takes-key-step-towards-b...
But extracting an accurate enough signal from noise through the skin is an incredibly complex signal analysis problem. And there are multiple approaches.
Nothing has FDA approval yet because it's a major question whether any technology developed thus far is accurate enough. I understand there's at least one clinical trial going on right now. Fingers crossed...
So the quick answer is: no, not even close. Also, you would somehow have to measure a very low concentration of soluble chemical in a fluid with always changing composition of a bunch of chemically similar other constituents across relatively wide tissue layers that themselves have a lot of that same chemical..
It's absolutely sci-fi.
But, in short, no, not yet: https://www.fda.gov/medical-devices/safety-communications/do...
Which - to be clear - is because the sensor chemically degrades over time. It's not just rent-seeking; they genuinely don't know how to make one that'll last longer.
>How often do you need constant O2 readings?
You're missing the point: the fact you have the freedom to get as many readings as you like is fundamental. Who are you to decide how often I want/need them?
>What places are phones not permitted but Apple Watches are?
1. Among others: courtrooms (phones must be turned off, but no restriction on Apple Watches). Source: my appearances as an expert witness in courtrooms around the country. 2. Classrooms (phones off/Watches fine) 3. Theaters 4. In a dental chair and many, many more places.
>Obviously not as good as the original, but you should still get a constant histogram once reconnected.
But what if I can't reconnect or don't want to?
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
Much like fusion that is continuously imminent though
Up to mid-2024, Costco was selling 2 separate SKUs of Apple Watch Ultra 2: watches with the blood oxygen feature and watches imported after the cutoff which were missing the feature.
A limitation of this workaround is that it only works on recent watches. If you are in the unfortunate position of getting a Series 6, 7, 8 watch replaced by Apple, they'll give you a replacement with the feature missing, and this update doesn't "fix" it..
There wasn't a requirement that it be disabled on watches that had already been imported, or on watches that weren't being imported to the US.
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.
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.
[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.
The only IP that companies can own now are specific methods/improvements, not the base idea of measuring SpO2 with light. All Apple has to do is avoid the specific improvements that Masimo owns and they are fine.
These were NOT small devices like the inexpensive fingertip versions you can buy now over the counter; rather, they were big boxlike machines, perhaps 2 feet x 1.5 feet x 8 inches high. They were SO heavy (I'd estimate 25 pounds) they were attached to a stainless steel rolling cart.
In today's dollars, that's $54,000-$80,000.
I use a watch and wireless headphones. The iphone stays at home.
But many people are willing to pay get more health information, especially wealthier demographics who have interest in health and appearances of health.