The Freedom: An Early Prototype of a Health Monitoring Platform at CES 2015, and What It Says About Apple Watches

The U.S. International Trade Commission found in October that some Apple Watches had violated Masimo’s patents, and issued a ban on the import of watches that included the technology.

I got to see an early prototype of the Freedom at CES last week, and in person, it’s an intriguing product. For starters, it’s visually distinct from the Apple Watch, in that it’s opted for a circular display with a leather band, with no digital crown in sight. There is a touch bar on the right side that you can use to scroll. On the left, if you squint, there’s a small button that you use to select items in the Freedom’s interface. At 46mm, it’s chunky on my petite wrist, but it didn’t look out of place on Eugene Goldberg, Masimo’s president of consumer health.

The bones of a fairly basic smartwatch were what I saw. There weren’t a whole lot of menus to go through, and the software was clearly a beta version that wasn’t ready for primetime. As a prototype, it was clear the platform was still evolving.

“Even as technology in general gets better, we need to create an expectation of what accuracy and ‘continuous’ [monitoring] actually means. Digital health is something that you can see in a show floor at the Consumer Electronics Show, but Goldberg isn’t sure if they’re all continuous. “You want to know where’s the good data, where’s the bad data, and then how do you as a health professional actually work with that data? That’s where all this is going.”

Goldberg is right about the shortcuts other watches take with their health readings. Many big-name watches don’t measure your heart rate, blood oxygen, or battery life, but they do measure once every few minutes. This is a selling point for other companies who are trying to make it a point, such as Omron who showed up at the Consumer Electronics Show last year with an FDA-cleared watch that could measure blood pressure.

Will it continue to stand out since the Apple watch will have a blood oxygen feature back, and if it can hold its own after all?

The Supreme Court of the US Supreme Court Regulated a Patent Violation Action on an Optical Blood-Oxygen Sensor

The decision of the court to rein in the feature ban is good news for American inventors and a reminder that even the largest and most powerful companies have to deal with consequences when they are caught violating others’ patents.

Instead of banning the watches outright, the court granted Apple permission to continue selling the watch as long as changes were made to remove the technology at the center of the patent fight.

According to Apple, the Federal Circuit should reverse the trade commission’s decision.

Starting Thursday, the ability to measure blood oxygen levels will no longer be available on newly purchased Apple Watch Series 9 and Watch Ultra 2 models.

Apple decided to drop the health feature after losing a patent case brought by the medical technology company Masimo, which alleged that Apple infringed on its patent for a blood oxygen sensor that can read someone’s pulse. Apple has repeatedly denied the allegation.