Court is supposed to remove import ban for Apple Watch

In the patent dispute with the medical technology company Masimo, Apple asked an appellate court to remove the import ban for Apple Watch models with blood oxygen monitoring. One argument is that the competitive product has not yet been developed.

Patent for pulseximetry

The legal dispute revolves around the technology for measuring the blood oxygen content, which Apple has been offering with the Apple Watch Series 6 since 2020. The medical technology company Masimo accuses Apple of violating several patents in the field of pulse oximetry with this function – the non -invasive measurement of blood oxygen saturation using light sensors. In 2023, Masimo therefore obtained an import ban in front of a US court.

Unjustified?

As the News agency Reuters reports, the decision of Apple’s legal representatives is rejected as unjustified because they have robbed “millions of Apple Watch users” of the blood oxygen function. Masimo reacts to the accusation that Apple wants to “rewrite the law”.

Masimo had accused Apple of first recruiting employees after failed licensing talks and then stealing the pulse oximetry technology. While Apple integrated the 2020 blood oxygen measurement into the Series 6, Masimo only launched its first o’clock with blood oxygen tracking in 2022. Apple claims that Masimo’s device was not ready for a market when the company submitted its complaint, and that the right should not allow it to justify hypothetical products. The decision was wrongly withheld millions of Apple watch users, according to Apple’s lawyer. Masimo had only launched a smartwatch with blood oxygen measurement two years after Apple.

The Apple Watch models sold in the USA have had to be delivered since the legal dispute (with short interruptions in which the ban was briefly suspended) without the blood oxygen function, while international versions retained their full functionality. The clashes between Apple and Masimo now last over five years and include three separate processes.

Although Masimo won a partial victory with the import ban, this had no significant impact on the business of the tech giant due to software due to Apple’s reaction to simply blocking the function in the USA. Masimo, founded in 1989, is considered a pioneer in pulseximetry technology and holds over 100 patents in this area. The company supplies hospitals worldwide with medical monitoring devices and sees Apple’s smartwatch technology a violation of its decades of research.