Blood oxygen monitoring returning to Apple Watch in the US

This discussion revolves around Apple's workaround for a blood oxygen sensing feature in its Watch, following a patent dispute with Masimo. The conversation touches on software patents, Apple's business practices, employee compensation, and the practical utility and accuracy of wearable health sensors.

Software Patents and Patent Absurdity

A significant portion of the discussion criticizes the nature and application of software patents, suggesting they stifle innovation and lead to absurd legal workarounds.

• "Software patents are a scourge." - BallsInIt
• "The whole concept of software patents is a hack; as I understand it algorithms as a rule cannot be patented, so the system running the algorithm is patented instead. This seems to illustrate the absurdity of that workaround." - sneak
• "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." - BugsJustFindMe
• "I dont think the patent in question is for software: https://patents.google.com/patent/US10912502B2/en" - anonu
• "Yeah, prob because one cannot patent an algorithm itself, but only a specific implementation. The patent was about a wearable device so i guess the workaround was to do the computations in a non-wearable device." - freehorse
• "Crazy that this is a 'patent'. We did this experiment in high school 30 years ago." - unglaublich
• "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." - brandonb

Apple's Business Practices and Talent Acquisition

Concerns are raised about Apple's aggressive tactics in acquiring talent from smaller companies, with some users questioning if this healthy for competition and innovation. The debate centers on whether Apple's actions are predatory or a natural consequence of market dynamics.

• "I would be a bit more sympathetic if this was not about a trillion dollar company who poached some employees rather than engage in a licensing deal." - 0cf8612b2e1e
• "25 employees including the CTO, and then bought a building nearby to Masimo's office for them to work in. At least according to the CEO of Masimo in public statements." - spogbiper
• "Yes, very good for the employees. Apple even offered them 2x their salaries to leave Masimo." - spogbiper
• "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 ." - FirmwareBurner
• "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." - FirmwareBurner
• "Apple is infamous for driving other companies into bankruptcy to acquire their assets. For a single example, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exponential_Technology" - FuriouslyAdrift
• "When it comes to employee compensation, Big Tech companies like Apple are more meritocratic and generally offer smart people much better deals." - jart
• "It’s mindblowing how big of a gap this is for these non-tech companies. I work for a company that sold to PE. The owners walked away with the vast majority of a 1.5 billion deal. ... Using some standard equity math for early engineers, I back of napkined that the 25 year tenure engineers, should have gotten low 7 figures. Nope. They got 50k out of 1.5 billion." - snapetom
• "Great for the employees. But Apple submarined their way in offering partnership, licensing, collaboration, with near zero plans to do any of it. So good for the employees, but I wouldn't be applauding Apple for their outright deceptions here." - FireBeyond
• "They destroyed the founders company and stole their IP in the process though. Let’s not forget there’s actual victims in this story." - hsbauauvhabzb
• "It's really easy to avoid your employees being 'poached': treat them well, and pay them better." - OkayPhysicist
• "If another company taking some of your employees will affect your company's bottom line, then you better pay those employees handsomely." - meindnoch
• "I hate the word “poaching”. A company offered employees more money in exchange for their labor. 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?" - scarface_74
• "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." - alistairSH

Masimo's Position and the Nature of Competition

The discussion also explores Masimo's role in the dispute, with some arguing Masimo initiated the conflict, while others defend their actions as a response to Apple's perceived illicit behavior. The size difference between the two companies is frequently highlighted.

• "Let's not forget Masimo picked the fight. Apple was fine letting them compete." - hbn
• "Pardon? Masimo was first and Apple took their tech (as confirmed by a court). Was Masimo supposed to sit there and shrug?" - 0cf8612b2e1e
• "Hah, plenty of people have described Masimo, 400 times smaller than Apple, in the threads on this as 'bullying Apple unfairly by being a patent troll.'" - FireBeyond
• "Then used them [Exponential] to negotiate a better price with Motorola and dumped their purchase contract for 'reasons' and bankrupted the company." - FuriouslyAdrift
• "Masimo is an $8b company. They created a spinoff called Cercacor which Lamego got to be CTO of. My best guess is it wasn't a real startup like we're used to in the Silicon Valley sense. ... Big tech companies like Apple are more meritocratic and generally offer smart people much better deals." - jart
• "They're already in most of the hospitals in America. ... I don't think they care about FAANG at all. They're not a software company. Look them up - this is big companies fighting, not David and Goliath." - eddieroger
• "> Look them up - this is big companies fighting, not David and Goliath. Massimo is 400x smaller than Apple. WTF are you talking about like they're in the same weight class?" - FirmwareBurner
• "Masimo did not appear to respond to Apple by trying to compete on compensation with them. The levels.fyi data is showing that they appear to pay their engineers between 140-180 while they are making hundreds of millions in profit. 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" - lovich
• "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." - runako

Utility and Accuracy of Wearable Health Sensors

A significant part of the conversation also delves into the practical value and reliability of blood oxygen monitoring on smartwatches, with many users expressing skepticism about its accuracy and diagnostic utility compared to dedicated medical devices.

• "I bought a cheap pulse oximeter during the pandemic and what I learned is that when I’m feeling light-headed, blood oxygen is low. So I decided that my body’s built-in blood oximeter is probably good enough most of the time." - skybrian
• "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?" - skybrian
• "I have it on my garmin and it seems pretty useless. My oxygen level while I sleep has more to do with how tightly I'm wearing it that night than anything else. It also drain the battery fast so I just disabled it. I have a real finger-based one bought during COVID that I trust more." - comrade1234
• "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." - neild
• "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'." - llm_nerd
• "Seems to me, it has some value (again, if it's accurate) for letting people know about sleep apnea; especially as part of an overall sleep tracking dodad." - toast0
• "As a result, for darker-skinned patients, oxygen saturation readings can read as normal when they are, in fact, dangerously low." - conradev
• "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." - brandonb
• "The problem with consumer health sensors is they have both high random error and inconsistent systematic error. When your SPO2 sensor gives you 92% one minute and 98% the next while you're sitting still and it is almost always 2% under, you're not getting 'noisy but usable' data - you're getting garbage." - rafaelmn
• "My old fashioned doctor said to test oxygen levels, all you need to do is pinch your index finger nail down until it goes white. Then when you let go, if it goes back to pink right away, you're good. If it takes more than a few seconds, you're not good." - DwnVoteHoneyPot
• "That's the capillary refill test which tests circulation and perfusion. Doesn't really tell you anything about oxygen levels." - qgin