12 of the 23 claims invalidated by being "obvious", in light of previous patents.
The rest invalidated against Apple, through "alternative claim construction". That is, Apple's reading of the patent and its specific claims, showed it was narrower in scope than their particular usage.
None of this seems really surprising, and whilst it does open the door for Apple, it probably doesn't much open the door for other implementations to flourish - not without a lawyer guiding your particular tech choices.
I find it hard to believe that this patent was keeping Apple from adding blood glucose sensing. Yes, I know a patent on blood oxygen level sensing stopped Apple, but there is a huge difference between oxygen level sensing and glucose sensing.
For oxygen sensing there are numerous readily available inexpensive stand-alone sensors available at any drug store or online. They are non-invasive and painless. Yes, a continuously wearable sensor would be better for some people but most people don't need that. Accordingly it is something that while nice wouldn't really sell a lot of watches, and so something that might not be worth licensing if it is under patent.
Glucose sensing on the other hand is a literal pain to test and has ongoing costs due to consumables used for the testing. Non-invasive painless glucose sensing on a watch is a feature that would sell a lot of watches. I think demand would be high enough, even if they have to raise prices, that it would easily be worth it.
we're building an artificial pancreas for hospitals, so I know a good bit about CGMs. Noninvasive blood sugar sensing is horrifically difficult. Every few years, people come along and say "oh this is just some simple DSP on spectroscopic information, piece of cake" before inevitably running up against:
- skin conductivity changes over time
- the ways in which skin tone changes signal absorption (which itself changes over time)
- the ways in which different levels of fitness affect blood flow, material density etc.
You also can't use it in a hospital setting, due to how your skin and bloodflow changes during serious conditions like sepsis (though I'm guessing they're not thinking about that market).
Really smart people have been trying to use Raman spectroscopy to solve this problem for decades at this point (early patents go to early 2000s). Apple is an extremely strong hardware vendor, and I wish them luck, but I would not hold my breath for this. Plus, I'm guessing they will not open the signal up for looping, which would really leave the T*DM community out to dry.
Honestly, none of those sound like blockers for the use case I and many other diabetics would like - monitoring for general blood sugar responses (rough curve) after eating. Sure, you wouldn't be able to use the measurements to dose insulin or even measure your actual (numeric) glucose level, but measuring my A1C every three months is good enough to do that in mine and many other cases. I've had my blood sugar controlled through diet and metformin with it being in the range of 5.9 - 6.2. I could do so much better if I had a better understanding of how my body, specifically, reacts to certain foods, mealtimes, routines (exercise after eating), etc.
It would be super helpful to know (relative to other foods) how my body reacts to claimed low-carb foods. Is there a large spike (don't need to know the number) or is it a much more flat curve? How long in general does it take for the line to return to pre-meal levels? What does that trend look like over many months? Heck, I could even run a rudimentary and simple test to do comparative insulin response to a known amount of carbs to see if my insulin response is improving over time (using the period of the curve). I would love to get an alert that hey, we think your glucose level shot up a lot (don't care how much) so that I can remediate it through exercise then and there and avoid that food or timing going forward.
Really hoping the people in Medtech don't make perfect the enemy of good in this case. Although maybe what you listed would still be blockers for even getting general glucose curves. I've been planning on getting a CGM for at least a few months to achieve all of this, but it would be great to just have it in a watch or other simple wearable.
I work in a related area. Non-invasive blood glucose has been a holy grail for analytical science, for decades, and remains a brutally difficult problem.
Yup. But there's hope that computational techniques can extract the signal from the noise.
If they can it'll be huge. Maybe even Ozempic-huge. There's a theory of weight loss that you can objectively manage your weight by never allowing your blood sugar to go over a certain level.
> Glucose sensing on the other hand is a literal pain to test
I’d be hard-pressed to believe that someone trying the newest Dexcom G7 CGM would find it more discomforting than a mosquito bite. And for that literal pain you get 10 days of constant readings on your phone.
> I think demand would be high enough, even if they have to raise prices, that it would easily be worth it.
This is probably correct but I don’t think many non-diabetic people would see an actual benefit from CGM data. It’s the kind of thing people love to think is useful but in reality it’ll be just one more thing to ignore.
I have type-1 diabetes, brought on late in life after going through a miserable 2 years of stress after my wife was in a coma due to medical negligence. She came out of it, but the damage was done, she won’t recover, and she is a shadow of who she was. Prolonged extreme stress can trigger type-1 diabetes, and once you have it, you have it for the rest of your life.
Right now, I’m on glipizide which manages (along with a low-carb diet) the situation, but I need the GCM so I know when this “honeymoon” period (before I start needing insulin) starts to end.
Unfortunately I have an extreme needle phobia too. My insurance doesn’t cover the G7, just the G6, so I don’t know if it’s different, but if I try to apply the G6, my heart rate will massively speed up, I will start to hyperventilate, and typically pass out when I click the button on the applicator. I’m out for only a few minutes, but it’s not a pleasant experience… I have to make sure I’m lying on a bed to do it now, after learning the hard way that it’s possible to fall when just sitting down, and head wounds don’t stop bleeding when you’re unconscious.
I would dearly love the ability to measure glucose non-invasively. It’s actually nowhere near as bad for me if I don’t have to click it myself, but my wife wouldn’t understand what to do, and my son is too young for me to feel comfortable asking. Theres no-one else around to help, so sometimes I make a dr appt, for a 10-second “click”. Most of the time I just put up with it. The hope is that the phobia starts to diminish, but so far it hasn’t, and yes I’ve tried psychologists.
Every 10 days, and [sigh] as I write, I recall that today is the day. Again.
Isn't that the key point and means Dexcom/Libre would cost you (or your insurance company) several thousands of dollars/pounds/euros/etc every single year. For many people they already have an iphone and just need an Apple watch which could last for several years.
> I’d be hard-pressed to believe that someone trying the newest Dexcom G7 CGM would find it more discomforting than a mosquito bite.
Not diabetic, but I've tried a set of two of these out of curiosity. The insertion pain is nothing, but having something bonded to your skin with adhesive constantly is kind of a pain.
I also got some irritation at the insertion sites around the 1-week mark, though that might have been because I don't have much fat on that area of my arm.
Wow! Really - this is the one patent-restricted feature I was hoping they were going to solve. I'm curious if a decent quality blood oxygen meter could give me additional data about my sleep apnea. I've previously trief several blood oxygen meters ordered from Amazon, and the results were very low accuracy and low confidence, and the only decent ones couldn't log data continuously over time. (At least not when I bought a few different ones a handful of years ago)
I'm in the US and I totally forgot about the blood oxygen patent fiasco. I have an Apple Watch Series 8 and it continues to work. Maybe it's only newer models that are affected?
Blocked by the International Trade Commission from being imported which is why watches prior to block still work. Patent case ended up in a hung jury trial with all but 1 juror siding with Apple.
Aside: I was surprised to read "dental caries" in the list of things detectable through similar methods in the court filing screenshot in this post. Is that about a device that could optically detect caries from tooth surfaces through similar principles?
If you've ever put a bright light up to your teeth in a mirror, it's pretty incredibly how translucent dental enamel actually is, and the level of internal detail you can see just by eye.
This is why patents are Regressive and should be done away with. They no longer protect small-time inventors, only corporations. They stifle all innovation.
The original point of a patent is a good one: document your work publicly and in return get a window of time to profit from said work. It was intended to improve innovation by making people not hide their work.
It wasn't really designed for people patenting vague concepts, math or ideas.
If you build a better mousetrap, a patent is pretty good. If you have a vague idea you might show ads in elevators, you should A: just be shot, and B: not get a patent
Lots of small companies only get funding because investors believe the IP will be worth something even if the company fails. I’m not wild about our current patent situation, but we have to recognize that a less restrictive recision would impact small business pretty hard.
Well, you can live in that world by observing China. IP doesn’t exist. All things are open source. You have to be careful doing things but people still do them and a cheaper product shows up on Aliexpress the next day.
I think that is a major problem with patents - all inventions are treated the same. However there is a big difference between something reasonably new that took a decade of r&d work to get right and a tiny change to an existing invention which took a day and is an obvious logical progession from what came before which everyone would have came up with.
I once attended a patent trial and it was interesting. The defendant claimed the patent was obvious.
The plaintiff had some pretty good evidence that it was in fact not obvious:
• The defendant was one of the largest companies in the field with a very accomplished and impressive R&D department. The plaintiff introduced documents they got from the defendant during discovery where the CEO had called solving the specific problem that the patent solved to be vital to the future existence of their company and made solving it a top priority. Yet they failed to make any progress on it.
• Two of the other largest companies in the field, also with impressive R&D departments, had also been working on this and failed to come up with anything.
The jury found that the patent was obvious.
What I think happened is that both plaintiff and defendant had presentations that explained to the jury what the patent did. Both presentations did a great job of finding a problem from everyday life that was kind of analogous to the problem the patent involved, and translating the patent's solution to that everyday life problem. The presentations made it easy to understand the gist of what the patent did.
There's a natural tendency to mistake easy to understand for obviousness, and I think that by explaining the invention in a way that made it easy to understand it also made the jury think it was obvious.
But if you don't explain the invention in a way that the jury can understand how are they supposed to be able to make decisions?
This reminds me of college. Many a time I'd read some theorem named after a mathematician and think "how the heck does this obvious theorem get named after someone?". The answer is that it wasn't at all obvious when that mathematician proved it 400 years ago. I'm seeing it after 400 years of people figuring out how to present the subject in a way that makes that theorem obvious.
That reminds me of a classic math joke: A professor says "It is obvious that" and writes an equation. Then he pauses, and says "...wait, is that obvious?". He goes to another board and starts deriving the equation, not saying anything while doing this. After 20 minutes he had gotten it, says "I was right! It is obvious!" and goes back and resumes his lecture.
The patent law definition of obvious is different from the common understanding.
Specifically, it only counts if it was obvious before the patent filing to a person of ordinary skill. It's actually really hard for a patent claim to be rejected for obviousness. A poking stick for pressing buttons on a TV without getting up counts as a non-obvious invention.
A lot of the patents needed to implement mobile standards are designated as "standards essential patents", meaning that the party bringing them up the table in the standards committees needs to disclose them and agree to licence them on a FRAND basis to anyone who asks (fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory).
In many cases there are patent pools you can license that cover large areas of the standards, without needing to negotiate each one individually.
Many very fundamental parts of 4G/ 5G are patented and you'll not be able to get your device to work on the network without those patents, so Apple will have licensed those patents under FRAND for their new C1 modem.
And will those reading features be available in Apple Watches just by virtues of you owning (or buying) the hardware or it will be behind a subscription (partially or fully)?
How accurate is it. I loved having a cgm for a few weeks. It’s over the counter now.
The strangest thing was keeping my blood sugar spikes really low but still gaining weight. I didn’t think my body could really store fat without a spike but apparently it can.
Is this a software or hardware patent, because afaics the sensors on the newer Watches would already support this so it could just be a software update?
Going through BS patents would be a nice job for Musk’s DOGE. That would do more good than firing people and two days later noticing that this people actually were important.
Huge market for endurance athletes. Just like heart rate and blood oxygen, blood glucose is a definitive marker whether you're going to fast or not. Having that information allows you to perform at the very edge your body is capable of performing, without ever exceeding that limit and crashing out.
There have been blood glucose sensors using needles for a long time, and many sports banned them because they are a huge advantage - but they didn't want to de-factor force every athlete to constantly prick an IV under their skin and then run around with it for hours.
Once those come in smart watches, every semi-advanced runner (and those who'd like to feel like one) will need one.
Yeah, the 20-year limit is definitely a thing. Maybe the 2004 patent was for some specific improvement to the original pulse oximeter tech? Patent law is tricky like that.
I have always had the following idea. Show specificalists in the domain the end result and make them reproduce it without reading the patent. If they succeed - the patent is invalid.
This is your daily reminder that patents stifle innovation. This was evident over a century ago and the poster child for this is the so-called Wright Brothers patent war [1].
The Wright brothers patented a method of flight control and then went on a litigation spree. The result was that the US was unable to build airplanes. This became a problem when the US entered World War One and the US military had to buy planes from France.
This situation was so bad that the Federal government stepped in to force the major players to create a patent pool, a situation that lasted until 1977.
Probably accurate enough to learn how your body responds to different foods and exercise, to help prevent pre-diabetes, to help with general weight loss, and to help endurance athletes in their training.
But there is no universe it will be accurate enough to make insulin dosing decisions. Insulin dependent diabetics will require CGMs or finger pricks for another couple decades.
I manage my diabete with a "sensor" (Dexcom), an insulin pump, and a "loop device."
I would NEVER use Apple Watch for therapy, and I don't think Apple wants to step into this minefield.
BUT I guarantee you that having your glucose level as an (instantaneous/statistical) data point is a game-changer.
There are "pre-diabetes" phases where even mild monitoring (and an alert) can be essential.
And for those already in the tunnel, knowing you can have an additional "backup" alarm for hypo/hyper is very interesting (though, thinking about it, another alarm… no, better not :-D).
Pretty accurate since this works of averages - discarding outliners and norming get you close to the actual number pretty quickly - also with glucose your're interested in fluctuations more than absolutes
I have a friend who tried one of the invasive continuous glucose monitors and finding out which common foods spiked their blood sugar the most and the least was useful.
Petens where invented so that the big companies wouln't steal your ideas and outcompete you in the market. I know that many of the people in this community is against patents, but they are ment to protect you guys in particular. So that your startup have a chanse against the big corporations.
Patents were invented as a way for governments (and really at the time monarchs) to regulate commercial activity and attract skilled craftspeople. Modern patents were a reform of this to stop monarchs from abusing this power as effectively a tax. This starts in Venice in 1474. By the time the US patent system was created, the goal was to promote publication of technical information, rather than it being kept secret. This was a few decades before the first industrial corporations in the US.
Since the system was changed from first-to-invent to first-to-file, it's now completely possible for a big corp to copy someone's invention, overtake them in the patent process, and lock them out of being able to patent or use their own invention.
That's not how it works. First-to-file (FTF) did not change the requirements for patentability. You still have to have invented the thing you want to patent, and in your scenario Big Corp did not invent the thing.
All FTF changes is what happens when multiple inventors invent the same thing.
Under first-to-invent (FTI) your priority date was the date you conceived the invention if you then worked diligently toward reducing the idea to practice up until you filed your patent application. If you stopped working diligently on reducing the idea to practice and then resumed it, the date you resumed became your new priority date.
What counts as a break in working toward reduction to practice sufficient to reset your priority date? How much documentation do you need to prove you were working continuously on it from your claimed priority date?
Figuring all that out can be expensive and time consuming and often gives results that seem wrong. It's almost random whether the priority date by this method actually matches who seems to morally most deserve the patent.
FTF gives priority to whoever files first. It doesn't produce any worse outcome than FTI and saves a lot of time and money for both the patent office and applicants.
12 of the 23 claims invalidated by being "obvious", in light of previous patents.
The rest invalidated against Apple, through "alternative claim construction". That is, Apple's reading of the patent and its specific claims, showed it was narrower in scope than their particular usage.
None of this seems really surprising, and whilst it does open the door for Apple, it probably doesn't much open the door for other implementations to flourish - not without a lawyer guiding your particular tech choices.
The patent: https://patents.google.com/patent/US10517484B2/en
Note how similar this is to the pulse oximeter, which was invented in Japan in 1972 and patented in the US in 2004.
https://www.nihonkohden.com/technology/aoyagi.html
https://patents.google.com/patent/US20050049469A1/en
> Note how similar this is to the pulse oximeter, which was invented in Japan in 1972 and patented in the US in 2004.
How could an invention from 1972, which I assume was publically disclosed around that time, be patented in 2004?
Were the details kept secret for 32 years?
38 replies →
I find it hard to believe that this patent was keeping Apple from adding blood glucose sensing. Yes, I know a patent on blood oxygen level sensing stopped Apple, but there is a huge difference between oxygen level sensing and glucose sensing.
For oxygen sensing there are numerous readily available inexpensive stand-alone sensors available at any drug store or online. They are non-invasive and painless. Yes, a continuously wearable sensor would be better for some people but most people don't need that. Accordingly it is something that while nice wouldn't really sell a lot of watches, and so something that might not be worth licensing if it is under patent.
Glucose sensing on the other hand is a literal pain to test and has ongoing costs due to consumables used for the testing. Non-invasive painless glucose sensing on a watch is a feature that would sell a lot of watches. I think demand would be high enough, even if they have to raise prices, that it would easily be worth it.
we're building an artificial pancreas for hospitals, so I know a good bit about CGMs. Noninvasive blood sugar sensing is horrifically difficult. Every few years, people come along and say "oh this is just some simple DSP on spectroscopic information, piece of cake" before inevitably running up against:
- skin conductivity changes over time
- the ways in which skin tone changes signal absorption (which itself changes over time)
- the ways in which different levels of fitness affect blood flow, material density etc.
You also can't use it in a hospital setting, due to how your skin and bloodflow changes during serious conditions like sepsis (though I'm guessing they're not thinking about that market).
Really smart people have been trying to use Raman spectroscopy to solve this problem for decades at this point (early patents go to early 2000s). Apple is an extremely strong hardware vendor, and I wish them luck, but I would not hold my breath for this. Plus, I'm guessing they will not open the signal up for looping, which would really leave the T*DM community out to dry.
Honestly, none of those sound like blockers for the use case I and many other diabetics would like - monitoring for general blood sugar responses (rough curve) after eating. Sure, you wouldn't be able to use the measurements to dose insulin or even measure your actual (numeric) glucose level, but measuring my A1C every three months is good enough to do that in mine and many other cases. I've had my blood sugar controlled through diet and metformin with it being in the range of 5.9 - 6.2. I could do so much better if I had a better understanding of how my body, specifically, reacts to certain foods, mealtimes, routines (exercise after eating), etc.
It would be super helpful to know (relative to other foods) how my body reacts to claimed low-carb foods. Is there a large spike (don't need to know the number) or is it a much more flat curve? How long in general does it take for the line to return to pre-meal levels? What does that trend look like over many months? Heck, I could even run a rudimentary and simple test to do comparative insulin response to a known amount of carbs to see if my insulin response is improving over time (using the period of the curve). I would love to get an alert that hey, we think your glucose level shot up a lot (don't care how much) so that I can remediate it through exercise then and there and avoid that food or timing going forward.
Really hoping the people in Medtech don't make perfect the enemy of good in this case. Although maybe what you listed would still be blockers for even getting general glucose curves. I've been planning on getting a CGM for at least a few months to achieve all of this, but it would be great to just have it in a watch or other simple wearable.
3 replies →
I work in a related area. Non-invasive blood glucose has been a holy grail for analytical science, for decades, and remains a brutally difficult problem.
Yup. But there's hope that computational techniques can extract the signal from the noise.
If they can it'll be huge. Maybe even Ozempic-huge. There's a theory of weight loss that you can objectively manage your weight by never allowing your blood sugar to go over a certain level.
9 replies →
> Glucose sensing on the other hand is a literal pain to test
I’d be hard-pressed to believe that someone trying the newest Dexcom G7 CGM would find it more discomforting than a mosquito bite. And for that literal pain you get 10 days of constant readings on your phone.
> I think demand would be high enough, even if they have to raise prices, that it would easily be worth it.
This is probably correct but I don’t think many non-diabetic people would see an actual benefit from CGM data. It’s the kind of thing people love to think is useful but in reality it’ll be just one more thing to ignore.
I have type-1 diabetes, brought on late in life after going through a miserable 2 years of stress after my wife was in a coma due to medical negligence. She came out of it, but the damage was done, she won’t recover, and she is a shadow of who she was. Prolonged extreme stress can trigger type-1 diabetes, and once you have it, you have it for the rest of your life.
Right now, I’m on glipizide which manages (along with a low-carb diet) the situation, but I need the GCM so I know when this “honeymoon” period (before I start needing insulin) starts to end.
Unfortunately I have an extreme needle phobia too. My insurance doesn’t cover the G7, just the G6, so I don’t know if it’s different, but if I try to apply the G6, my heart rate will massively speed up, I will start to hyperventilate, and typically pass out when I click the button on the applicator. I’m out for only a few minutes, but it’s not a pleasant experience… I have to make sure I’m lying on a bed to do it now, after learning the hard way that it’s possible to fall when just sitting down, and head wounds don’t stop bleeding when you’re unconscious.
I would dearly love the ability to measure glucose non-invasively. It’s actually nowhere near as bad for me if I don’t have to click it myself, but my wife wouldn’t understand what to do, and my son is too young for me to feel comfortable asking. Theres no-one else around to help, so sometimes I make a dr appt, for a 10-second “click”. Most of the time I just put up with it. The hope is that the phobia starts to diminish, but so far it hasn’t, and yes I’ve tried psychologists.
Every 10 days, and [sigh] as I write, I recall that today is the day. Again.
3 replies →
> you get 10 days
Isn't that the key point and means Dexcom/Libre would cost you (or your insurance company) several thousands of dollars/pounds/euros/etc every single year. For many people they already have an iphone and just need an Apple watch which could last for several years.
1 reply →
> I’d be hard-pressed to believe that someone trying the newest Dexcom G7 CGM would find it more discomforting than a mosquito bite.
Not diabetic, but I've tried a set of two of these out of curiosity. The insertion pain is nothing, but having something bonded to your skin with adhesive constantly is kind of a pain.
I also got some irritation at the insertion sites around the 1-week mark, though that might have been because I don't have much fat on that area of my arm.
The market is likely for folks that are unaware that they have some glucose issue.
2 replies →
Huh? The G7 requires an app on your phone. Being slim and hitting muscle when using any kind of subcutaneous device burns like hell.
The CGM that wins is the one that doesnt stop working when batteries die. Or piercing the skin.
Note that this isn't the Blood Oxygen sensor (Masimo being the other party in that case), which is still stuck in court.
The blood oxygen sensor does work outside the US
Wow! Really - this is the one patent-restricted feature I was hoping they were going to solve. I'm curious if a decent quality blood oxygen meter could give me additional data about my sleep apnea. I've previously trief several blood oxygen meters ordered from Amazon, and the results were very low accuracy and low confidence, and the only decent ones couldn't log data continuously over time. (At least not when I bought a few different ones a handful of years ago)
6 replies →
I'm in the US and I totally forgot about the blood oxygen patent fiasco. I have an Apple Watch Series 8 and it continues to work. Maybe it's only newer models that are affected?
(Aha, this article says it's Series 9 and Ultra 2 that are affected: <https://www.tomsguide.com/wellness/smartwatches/apple-wins-p...>.)
Mine doesn't seem to. I have a US Apple Watch that I use outside the US all the time. Non-US account/app store too.
6 replies →
Blocked by the International Trade Commission from being imported which is why watches prior to block still work. Patent case ended up in a hung jury trial with all but 1 juror siding with Apple.
Final decision: https://www.bloomberglaw.com/public/desktop/document/USPTOPT...
Aside: I was surprised to read "dental caries" in the list of things detectable through similar methods in the court filing screenshot in this post. Is that about a device that could optically detect caries from tooth surfaces through similar principles?
If you've ever put a bright light up to your teeth in a mirror, it's pretty incredibly how translucent dental enamel actually is, and the level of internal detail you can see just by eye.
That’s how dentists check for issues as well: they very briefly shine a light through your teeth and capture a picture the resulting shadow.
1 reply →
Also a nice way to realize how cracked your teeth might be.
Startup opportunity for a light based 3rd tooth scanner?
1 reply →
Check out https://www.perceptive.io/
This is great news and I can only hope for something similar to transpire with e-ink patents. fingers crossed
Many of those may be actually getting close to expiry if not expired already - the technology is over 20 years old by now.
I remember doing a report in high school chemistry class, 75 years ago, on the promise of e-ink technology.
3 replies →
interesting, what kinds of things are being held back in the meantime? Or, just price/competition?
Most good inventions are "obvious" in hindsight.
This is why patents are Regressive and should be done away with. They no longer protect small-time inventors, only corporations. They stifle all innovation.
The original point of a patent is a good one: document your work publicly and in return get a window of time to profit from said work. It was intended to improve innovation by making people not hide their work.
It wasn't really designed for people patenting vague concepts, math or ideas.
If you build a better mousetrap, a patent is pretty good. If you have a vague idea you might show ads in elevators, you should A: just be shot, and B: not get a patent
5 replies →
If they exist, they should be 3 - 5 years. Not 20. That's insane and creates monopolies.
12 replies →
Lots of small companies only get funding because investors believe the IP will be worth something even if the company fails. I’m not wild about our current patent situation, but we have to recognize that a less restrictive recision would impact small business pretty hard.
10 replies →
Well, you can live in that world by observing China. IP doesn’t exist. All things are open source. You have to be careful doing things but people still do them and a cheaper product shows up on Aliexpress the next day.
Some are more obvious than others.
I think that is a major problem with patents - all inventions are treated the same. However there is a big difference between something reasonably new that took a decade of r&d work to get right and a tiny change to an existing invention which took a day and is an obvious logical progession from what came before which everyone would have came up with.
I once attended a patent trial and it was interesting. The defendant claimed the patent was obvious.
The plaintiff had some pretty good evidence that it was in fact not obvious:
• The defendant was one of the largest companies in the field with a very accomplished and impressive R&D department. The plaintiff introduced documents they got from the defendant during discovery where the CEO had called solving the specific problem that the patent solved to be vital to the future existence of their company and made solving it a top priority. Yet they failed to make any progress on it.
• Two of the other largest companies in the field, also with impressive R&D departments, had also been working on this and failed to come up with anything.
The jury found that the patent was obvious.
What I think happened is that both plaintiff and defendant had presentations that explained to the jury what the patent did. Both presentations did a great job of finding a problem from everyday life that was kind of analogous to the problem the patent involved, and translating the patent's solution to that everyday life problem. The presentations made it easy to understand the gist of what the patent did.
There's a natural tendency to mistake easy to understand for obviousness, and I think that by explaining the invention in a way that made it easy to understand it also made the jury think it was obvious.
But if you don't explain the invention in a way that the jury can understand how are they supposed to be able to make decisions?
This reminds me of college. Many a time I'd read some theorem named after a mathematician and think "how the heck does this obvious theorem get named after someone?". The answer is that it wasn't at all obvious when that mathematician proved it 400 years ago. I'm seeing it after 400 years of people figuring out how to present the subject in a way that makes that theorem obvious.
That reminds me of a classic math joke: A professor says "It is obvious that" and writes an equation. Then he pauses, and says "...wait, is that obvious?". He goes to another board and starts deriving the equation, not saying anything while doing this. After 20 minutes he had gotten it, says "I was right! It is obvious!" and goes back and resumes his lecture.
Could you elaborate on what the patent was or share the patent number?
The patent law definition of obvious is different from the common understanding.
Specifically, it only counts if it was obvious before the patent filing to a person of ordinary skill. It's actually really hard for a patent claim to be rejected for obviousness. A poking stick for pressing buttons on a TV without getting up counts as a non-obvious invention.
Like the Blonsky birthing table for instance.
I believe apple is struggling to implement the 5g spec due to patents, how do you square that? Just confuses me
A lot of the patents needed to implement mobile standards are designated as "standards essential patents", meaning that the party bringing them up the table in the standards committees needs to disclose them and agree to licence them on a FRAND basis to anyone who asks (fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory).
In many cases there are patent pools you can license that cover large areas of the standards, without needing to negotiate each one individually.
Many very fundamental parts of 4G/ 5G are patented and you'll not be able to get your device to work on the network without those patents, so Apple will have licensed those patents under FRAND for their new C1 modem.
Indeed, therefore if an invention is “obvious” in hindsight it must be good ;)
And will those reading features be available in Apple Watches just by virtues of you owning (or buying) the hardware or it will be behind a subscription (partially or fully)?
Is this patent the only thing that is holding them back?
Or are there still quite a few challenges ahead and this is merely one roadblock removed.
How accurate is it. I loved having a cgm for a few weeks. It’s over the counter now.
The strangest thing was keeping my blood sugar spikes really low but still gaining weight. I didn’t think my body could really store fat without a spike but apparently it can.
Consider the long term sugar available as integrating the curve, minus a basal rate, minus additional expenditures.
The spikes don't help either.
I wish there was a way to measure blood pressure via an Apple Watch :) Don't think that's feasible
Was the Omni MedSci patent used in any existing commercial products?
Is this a software or hardware patent, because afaics the sensors on the newer Watches would already support this so it could just be a software update?
Going through BS patents would be a nice job for Musk’s DOGE. That would do more good than firing people and two days later noticing that this people actually were important.
You probably can use these physics to measure many other molecules in a continuous non invasive way.
This will be a revolution in personalized medicine.
Ketones next please.
A search tells me its for type 1 diabetics. Are there other applications, like keto dieters?
Huge market for endurance athletes. Just like heart rate and blood oxygen, blood glucose is a definitive marker whether you're going to fast or not. Having that information allows you to perform at the very edge your body is capable of performing, without ever exceeding that limit and crashing out.
There have been blood glucose sensors using needles for a long time, and many sports banned them because they are a huge advantage - but they didn't want to de-factor force every athlete to constantly prick an IV under their skin and then run around with it for hours.
Once those come in smart watches, every semi-advanced runner (and those who'd like to feel like one) will need one.
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Many chronic illnesses are currently being researched as a KD treatment target.
Continuous ketones measurement is a big deal.
Yeah, the 20-year limit is definitely a thing. Maybe the 2004 patent was for some specific improvement to the original pulse oximeter tech? Patent law is tricky like that.
I have always had the following idea. Show specificalists in the domain the end result and make them reproduce it without reading the patent. If they succeed - the patent is invalid.
Went better than last time when they were stealing Masimo patented tech.
This is your daily reminder that patents stifle innovation. This was evident over a century ago and the poster child for this is the so-called Wright Brothers patent war [1].
The Wright brothers patented a method of flight control and then went on a litigation spree. The result was that the US was unable to build airplanes. This became a problem when the US entered World War One and the US military had to buy planes from France.
This situation was so bad that the Federal government stepped in to force the major players to create a patent pool, a situation that lasted until 1977.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_brothers_patent_war
"Celebrating Apple's spirit of innovation" yeah, sure.
Why only Apple? Wouldn't this allow every smart watch/sensor manufacturer to do the same thing?
does anyone with relevant scientific background know how accurate this kind of sensor could potentially be?
Probably accurate enough to learn how your body responds to different foods and exercise, to help prevent pre-diabetes, to help with general weight loss, and to help endurance athletes in their training.
But there is no universe it will be accurate enough to make insulin dosing decisions. Insulin dependent diabetics will require CGMs or finger pricks for another couple decades.
I manage my diabete with a "sensor" (Dexcom), an insulin pump, and a "loop device." I would NEVER use Apple Watch for therapy, and I don't think Apple wants to step into this minefield. BUT I guarantee you that having your glucose level as an (instantaneous/statistical) data point is a game-changer. There are "pre-diabetes" phases where even mild monitoring (and an alert) can be essential. And for those already in the tunnel, knowing you can have an additional "backup" alarm for hypo/hyper is very interesting (though, thinking about it, another alarm… no, better not :-D).
Pretty accurate since this works of averages - discarding outliners and norming get you close to the actual number pretty quickly - also with glucose your're interested in fluctuations more than absolutes
that's an interesting question.
there's sort of a usefulness threshold, and then there's a "can calculate insulin" threshold.
I think a LOT of people could benefit from plain high, medium, low with the understanding that you wouldn't make insulin decision based on it.
I have a friend who tried one of the invasive continuous glucose monitors and finding out which common foods spiked their blood sugar the most and the least was useful.
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Petens where invented so that the big companies wouln't steal your ideas and outcompete you in the market. I know that many of the people in this community is against patents, but they are ment to protect you guys in particular. So that your startup have a chanse against the big corporations.
I really like the tool for the little guys which requires a $100/hour+ lawyer both to create, and to enforce, and to gain any other benefit out of.
Patents were created not to protect the little man, but with the intent of creating a vibrant commons of knowledge.
Not that the original intent matters at all at this point, we're so far from that that it's only really of interest to historians.
Where does one find a $100/hour lawyer?
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Originally intended, not the way they are used now, especially with the costs involved.
Patents were invented as a way for governments (and really at the time monarchs) to regulate commercial activity and attract skilled craftspeople. Modern patents were a reform of this to stop monarchs from abusing this power as effectively a tax. This starts in Venice in 1474. By the time the US patent system was created, the goal was to promote publication of technical information, rather than it being kept secret. This was a few decades before the first industrial corporations in the US.
Seems like they’re mostly accomplishing the opposite these days.
This is entirely inaccurate (patently so!)
A couple of 30 second Google searches would show how their invention pre-dated the prevalence of big companies by centuries.
Road to hell is paved with good intentions.
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Since the system was changed from first-to-invent to first-to-file, it's now completely possible for a big corp to copy someone's invention, overtake them in the patent process, and lock them out of being able to patent or use their own invention.
That's not how it works. First-to-file (FTF) did not change the requirements for patentability. You still have to have invented the thing you want to patent, and in your scenario Big Corp did not invent the thing.
All FTF changes is what happens when multiple inventors invent the same thing.
Under first-to-invent (FTI) your priority date was the date you conceived the invention if you then worked diligently toward reducing the idea to practice up until you filed your patent application. If you stopped working diligently on reducing the idea to practice and then resumed it, the date you resumed became your new priority date.
What counts as a break in working toward reduction to practice sufficient to reset your priority date? How much documentation do you need to prove you were working continuously on it from your claimed priority date?
Figuring all that out can be expensive and time consuming and often gives results that seem wrong. It's almost random whether the priority date by this method actually matches who seems to morally most deserve the patent.
FTF gives priority to whoever files first. It doesn't produce any worse outcome than FTI and saves a lot of time and money for both the patent office and applicants.