Sorry, maybe I missed it - but source for this?

  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.

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

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.

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".

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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

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.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulse_oximetry#History

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.

But many people are willing to pay get more health information, especially wealthier demographics who have interest in health and appearances of health.