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 "clock" does not start when the invention happens, which is anyway a very hard thing to pin down. But as you say, it creates very counter intuitive results.
Often used by people who are American (from the Americas) but not from the US. Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Columbia, and the rest of North and South America.
Doing a bit of digging online, while there is evidence that /some/ people use it, it appears to be very limited. I understand the desire some people have for an unambiguous English term to refer to things from the US separately from those of the Americas in general, and see the value in doing so. Personally, as a native English speaker, I find USAnian to be clunky - maybe someone has thought (or will think) of a term that feels more natural. It feels analogous to the push from (largely English-speaking) activists in the US to use the term "latinx", much of the intended audience doesn't run into issues with the current terminology and aren't looking for a new term, and the term doesn't feel natural to existing speakers.
You can say what you want, whether or not people will understand what you mean or interpret it the way you intended is the more relevant question, in my opinion.
In English, American means from the US, and there's no word to refer to an inhabitants of the Americas (both continents combined). You can say North American or South American if you want, though. Since those are continents.
You won't find "USAnian" in any authoritative published dictionary, not even the OED:
And anyway, official dictionaries are largely historical records, not authoritative sources for living languages. Words mean what people who use them intend them to mean.
The digressions started with the first mention of the term in question by SSLy, not just the descriptor you mentioned. That user was probably pointlessly baiting, knowing that the nonstandard term would set someone off, which has led to the digressions that followed.
I've been using that term on and off. This was the first time someone came forward saying it's incorrect. I don't disagree with your assessment of my intentions, but it wasn't that usage, it was the politics part.
By your definition of dictionary. Again, words mean what people who use them intend them to mean. Urban Dictionary and Wiktionary are both dictionaries as far as I'm concerned.
I haven’t looked at the patent documents, but I’d bet money it’s not the same. The later US patent is probably for an improvement on the original device.
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.
Agreed that the value of a CGM is in the change information, and that adding a CGM is probably the biggest quality of life increase for anyone with diabetes. Highly pro CGM if you can get it!
The issue with spectroscopic approaches is the amount of noise can be really hard to disentangle, to the point that you might get really unreliable trend information, where it might even be dangerous if you're making dosing decisions off it. And even if you aren't, getting incorrect trend information doesn't really help you any more than just not knowing it.
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.
What do you mean it doesn't work? How do you know?
And no -- your weight on the scale varies drastically with water levels and food in the gut. By up to five pounds. It is useless for figuring out if you can eat another bite of rice.
While glucose levels are literally minute-by-minute. They're fine-grained enough to actually tell you when to eat more and when to not.
I think the point was that it is easier said than done.
Losing weight is simple in theory, you can just eat less. In practice, eating less is very hard for some people. Having real time glucose information isn't going to help those people.
Losing weight is hard because it can be incredibly difficult to "just eat less" by the right amount.
If you "eat less" too little, you won't lose weight. While if you "eat less" too much, your health suffers and willpower becomes too difficult.
And counting calories doesn't work well if your calorie needs vary per-day, which nearly everyone's does -- how much did you walk, what temperature were the rooms you were in, etc.
The idea is that real time glucose information will allow you to "eat just right" -- never eating so little that willpower becomes an issue, but never so much that you gain weight (or fail to lose weight).
Nonsense. Tell this to humans that die when their blood glucose is insanely high (500mg/dl), go into DKA and they are SKINNY!!! You’re suggesting 20 calories can make you obese because it raises blood glucose lol! 3-5 grams (12-20 calories) of a mild-glycemic index carbohydrate can send your blood glucose well above 120mg/dl and you would not gain weight because of an extra 12-20 calories. Additionally, 1,200 calories from fat (133 grams of fat) will not spike your blood glucose until 5-12 hours later and you you can gain weight, but that signal is lost because the rise in blood glucose happens 1-3 meals, or even the next day after eating the high fat meal. Blood glucose is VERY important but not predictive of weight. Diet, (the amount and macro composition of calories) is predictive of weight and exercise is predictive of weight. The are other factors, but those are the main predictors.
> Tell this to humans that die when their blood glucose is insanely high (500mg/dl), go into DKA and they are SKINNY!!!
We're not talking about people with underlying health conditions. Exceptions don't invalidate a general principle.
> You’re suggesting 20 calories can make you obese because it raises blood glucose lol!
Nothing "lol" about it. An extra 20 calories, 20 times a day, every day for months and years, above your caloric needs, is yes quite likely to make you obese. How else do you think most people get obese?
> fat... will not spike your blood glucose until 5-12 hours later
And you can become aware of those patterns. You will know, for example, not to eat anything else during that window. Or learn to eat fat in gradual amounts, rather than large amounts in a single sitting.
> Blood glucose is VERY important but not predictive of weight.
You seem quite confident about that. You're also quite possibly wrong. The underlying logic is pretty sound: we gain weight when our blood sugar goes up and therefore our insulin goes up to remove the sugar from the bloodstream and, eventually, store it as fat.
> The underlying logic is pretty sound: we gain weight when our blood sugar goes up and therefore our insulin goes up to remove the sugar from the bloodstream and, eventually, store it as fat.
I like this post because it assumes that humans don’t use sugar for energy. It is all stored as fat because the human body is a closed system that does not burn calories.
Also I like “I see you said 20, obviously you mean 20 times that”
> 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.
The G7 has a smaller applicator. To me it looks less "needly" than the G6 did. The libre applicator is even smaller. There's less of a need to look at the underside because the applicator is set on the skin without having to pull free the sticker. That could make it easier for you.
But obviously they all have a needle because they need to get something under your skin. Which is I guess what triggers you.
Doesn't really matter what the G7 offers, it's not covered by the insurance :( I was originally on the Libre-3 but they stopped making them (now it's virtually the same thing but called the Libre-3+ and my insurance doesn't offer that either, even though the difference is just in Bluetooth).
So G6 it is. And yeah, the difference between the non-invasive and invasive is what causes the problem. It's weird, I don't have any other phobias, but I found out about this one when we all stabbed our fingers to test our blood-groups in school. Fell off the stool in the lab, 14 stitches in my scalp. Not the last time, either.
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.
If apples app explains everything simply and factually, maybe users can set alerts if a meal spikes tbem more than a meal normally does. I don't know much about diabetes so flip that around if I said it backward.
I would have probably quit drinking alcohol a lot earlier if I had seen the hell it plays with sugars in your blood iirc.
Sometimes a notification that you did something unhealthy might be enough? Like my watch buzzes if it detects less than X steps in the last hour, tells me to get up. The app tells me I get to sleep too late most days.
If it told me that food I just ate is something I'll have to be careful with...
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?
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)
Which is the opposite of what's needed to understand whether scattered short term variations are breathing stops to worry about.
> regularity
Their variation feature does mark moments of (selectable low/med/high) variance, without the medically diagnostic information that seems to get patent claimants going.
One would then need to get a pre-ban Apple Watch (as it's a software toggle and the ban was not retroactive watches registered before that date continue to support the feature) or other device to monitor and record the data one's doctor needs.
Perhaps you could try a Garmin watch or activity band? Afaict they don't have the same geo restriction. They're less smart as smart watches go, but in return they have better battery life
I have an amazfit bip 2 or 3 and iirc I can enable spo2 monitoring "constantly" I don't because mine is always 99 so I shut it off and just test manually.
It tracks movement and breathing during sleep. I think it now tracks snoring too, wakeups, rem/deep sleep times, and steps, heart rate, and stress levels.
The app is called zepp and I don't know if any of this is exportable but I only care about a cheap watch that has heartrate on it.
Did you try the ones from https://getwellue.com/? In my informal testing against “medical-grade” SPO2 monitors they were accurate and they record all night long.
That's plain wrong. iPhone uses sim data or something to enable/disable that noise. Source: myself with two iPhones bought in Japan and used both there and in the EU.
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.
Check if glidewell has a patent on it first. They have the smallest intra-oral scanner I've seen, and I saw it 12 years ago. It's like a cigar. I may be wrong and they didn't make the scanner.
That must have been a typo, sarcasm or trolling. Looking at the users other submissions, they seem to have parents [1], go to the gym [2] and use Tinder [3] which seems unlikely if they are ~90 years old.
It was an exaggeration. High school was decades ago, but it feels like a million years. We thought e-ink tech would be widespread within a handful of years. Little did we know.
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
But today with software you can publish just a generic description and do not disclose actual algorithms and formulas, so there is no value for everyone else. For example, you could patent a program that "chooses the best investment options using AI" without describing any details even if you don't know how to actually implement this.
(Well after I posted this comment you can't anymore)
"Add something to a digital shopping cart", "Minigames on a loading screen". If I can replicate it without reading any details in your patent, it's not patent worthy.
> For example, you could patent a program that "chooses the best investment options using AI" without describing any details even if you don't know how to actually implement this.
That’s not true. I have several issued US patents and while you don’t publish the code, you certainly have to disclose enough high level details that another person versed in the art would be able to implement it.
No, this has had extensive research. Patents slowed down both inventors and industries deploying new technologies. The story that it would enable a period of time for direct profits turned out to be false. There is more to be made by simply moving forward with adoption of new inventions.
There's a pretty fundamental difference between patents and copyright that I think justifies copyright being longer: a copyrighted work could not exist without its creator. IE, the Beatles catalog would not exist without the 4 Beatles, specifically. However patents are discoveries and can be discovered by other people.
I don't disagree, though I would argue that bullshit like "design patents" blur that line somewhat.
Even within patents, you're not supposed to be able to patent a "fact", which is why most math is non-patentable, and it gets into kind of weird territory when you get into stuff like algorithms: is an algorithm part of mathematics and therefore a fact and therefore non-patentable? or is it closer to an invention and engineering, and therefore should be patented? Or is coding "creative" enough to where we should actually be copyrighting algorithms?
I have no idea the answer to that question, or where the line should be drawn (though I gravitate towards the "math" side).
I don't know where I'm going with this; intellectual property law is weird.
Yeah, as in all things, the categories start to blur at the edges. Most algorithms seem like mathematical discoveries to me, whereas the source code for a piece of software has pretty clear corollaries to copyrighted works like novels (including passing the test that I propose: it could not exist without it's creator).
I kind of think that patents should not exist. I'm not a scholar in the area, but I am not aware of good evidence that, without patents, we would be bereft of the many inventions of human history and especially the last 200 years. And actually, the open source movement demonstrates that there is a very strong human impulse that will create and invent things without material recompense. My reading of patent history is that people who were inventing things anyway wanted a way to profit from it, not that there was a lack of invention and patents were arrived at as a solution to that problem.
Perhaps someone could object that companies are responsible for a lot of invention and they need to be incentivized in a way that individual inventors do not. But I'm not convinced that making a better mousetrap isn't enough of an incentive. After all, companies spend an incredible amount of money on sales and marketing (usually a larger line item than R&D on a company's income statement) and neither of those gives you a legally enforced competitive advantage.
I think the best argument for patents is to encourage drug discovery, since the costs are enormous due to the testing requirements. But if the main cost is in testing, then perhaps the solution is to require that copycat medications also go through the testing process, at least for some period of time. Or just have patents for drugs but not for other things. Or just have the government engage in drug discovery and validation directly (normally I'm against the government doing stuff, but I'm not convinced that the lack of a profit motive would be worse than the presence of a profit motive when it comes to drug discover).
No, copyrights make sense to be longer. But not “century” long. But something like 15 years for a copyright, renewable each year after for a growing cost, up to 30 years total, seems reasonable to me.
The main point being, if you’re still making money hand over fist from your book you wrote, or film you made, you can keep the copyright. But at some point, you have to prove it has value by paying for it, with a fast growing price each year after, and still a finite time where the copyright goes away entirely. This prevents dead copyrights where you can’t even find the copyright holder, because they died 50 years ago, and the work is obscure, but you want to license it. But if you create some original song or story or whatever, it’s totally fair that only you get to make money from that for a very long while.
I actually think copyrights could have the exact timeline that patents do right now and I'd be more or less happy; twenty years with a possible ten year extension seems pretty fair to me.
That's enough time to realistically make money off your creation, but not so much time that your great grandkids are also making money off of it.
The fact that a lot of things are invented and patented in the US shows that the comparatively shorter timespan doesn't appear to be discouraging innovation and creativity, and I think that would hold with copyright as well.
> The main point being, if you’re still making money hand over fist from your book you wrote, or film you made, you can keep the copyright.
> But if you create some original song or story or whatever, it’s totally fair that only you get to make money from that for a very long while.
Why is this “very long while” based on how much money you are making, and why would it be different from creating anything else?
The point of taxpayer funded legal and police protection for owners of patents and copyright terms is to incentivize creating something, not to maximize rent seeking abilities for the creator.
I don’t think preventing you from diluting the brand I created is rent seeking. Creating a work is an investment, which, almost never pays off (think of how many unknown musicians, authors, and artists there are). So when you find something that people like en masse, you should be allowed to reap those benefits. I hardly consider that rent seeking. But the escalating cost prevents actual rent seeking - if your work stops producing value, squatting on it IS rent seeking, and so you have to pay escalating amounts, or relinquish it, and let someone else have a stab at it. You are also allowed to continue to create new derivative works, and you have a huge head start on any future competition, since you have that time limited window. So if you continue to create new value, your timer “restarts” on those new works, so I think that’s sufficient incentive to continue creating.
Trademarks protect brands, not copyright and patents. That is a different discussion, but trademarks already work that way, where if the trademark owner keeps using the trademark, then they get to keep it. A creative work is not a brand, the name of the person or company that produced it is a brand.
> if your work stops producing value, squatting on it IS rent seeking
“Producing value” is far too nebulous of a parameter to legally enforce. Again, the point of a copyright and patent is to incentivize creation. At a certain point, it moves from incentivizing to rewarding those that sit on previous accomplishments.
That is why old movies, music, and games are locked away or only accessible via pirating, why TV shows from the 1990s and 2000s have different soundtracks if streamed legally today, and why patent trolls exist.
An R&D cycle itself can be 5 years, a 1-2 year patent approval time is typical. Industrializing research for production is at least a year, not to mention finding a market fit. And you are supposed to recoup all that in 3-5 years? Just tooling amortization can take that much.
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.
It is not complicated. Patents are regressive instruments of the rich to shackle minds and generate artificial scarcity over abundant goods.
It is a mechanism of slavers and connected lineages, and completely puts of a boot on the neck of unconnected innovators, which are abundant in today's age.
I’m not following the “unconnected” part. There are definitely problems with our patent system (referring to US), especially around software, but in my experience examiners are indifferent to your background and lineage (though not indifferent to their own status at USPTO). There is absolutely a monetary barrier to entry on using a lawyer to draft your patent application, but I feel like that’s more an issue of private law firms than patents in general. Though I’m sure others might have comments on how those intertwine.
But filing fees, etc (ie those things set by the USPTO) are really quite reasonable imo. Strictly speaking you don’t have to use a lawyer to file (I know that can be a minor concession in the landscape of practical success). Maybe you can clarify what you mean by “connected” vs “unconnected”in this case? I’m missing how patent law directly related to connections/lineage beyond what sister comments have said re: ability to litigate or be patent trolls. But I think that’s the point of the sister comment on it (at least ideally) cutting both ways.
In the current system if a giant company just steals something, will you be able to last through years of legal proceedings while they're the ones reaping the profits?
Willful patent infringement provides for treble damages based on damages that are often determinable from the infringer’s sales/profits and provides for recoupment of attorney’s fees. If you have a truly patentable idea then the juice of attorneys fees is often worth the risk-adjusted squeeze of litigation.
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.
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.
Endurance athletes are a small market and the market for endurance athletes who would benefit from a CGM is even smaller.
> every semi-advanced runner (and those who'd like to feel like one) will need one
This, however, is the truth. Every semi-advanced runner (and wannabe) knows that they need to run more, run slower on most of their runs, run fast occasionally, and eat well in order to improve their performance. But they’ll buy literally anything that might offer them an “edge” instead.
> Endurance athletes are a small market and the market for endurance athletes who would benefit from a CGM is even smaller.
It's not that small. Garmin made billions in revenue here, expanding it on the process. Most of their customers don't really need blood oxygen either, but they all have it anyway.
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.
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.
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