The Apple Watch‘s legally-contested blood oxygen feature is being credited with helping a doctor save the life of an airline passenger on a January 9 Ryanair flight to Verona, Italy from Birmingham, UK.
During the flight, a woman in her 70s was found to be short of breath, which prompted the flight’s cabin crew to ask if a doctor was onboard the flight. NHS doctor Rashid Riaz was on the flight and volunteered to help.
According to a report from the BBC (via AppleInsider), The woman had a history of heart issues and failed to immediately respond to the doctor’s queries.
Dr Riaz borrowed an Apple Watch from a crew member to try and monitor her vitals. “The Apple Watch helped me to find out the patient had low oxygen saturation,” he explained.
The doctor used an onboard oxygen cylinder on the woman until the plane landed in Italy an hour later. Happily, the lady recovered quickly and was able to disembark with aid from a medical staff.
“I used a lot of my own learning during this flight on how to use the gadget,” Dr. Riaz commented. “It is a lesson in how we can improve in-flight journeys [with] this sort of emergency [via] a basic gadget which nowadays is easily available.”
Apple has been in a patent dispute with medical tech company Masimo related to the Apple Watch’s blood oxygen measuring capabilities.
Masimo in 2020 claimed Apple stole Masimo employees and stole trade secrets while the Cupertino firm was developing the Apple Watch. Masimo was seeking over $1.8 billion in damages and co-ownership of five Apple pulse oximetry patents that Masimo said used its technology.
Apple did indeed hire employees away from Masimo, hiring Chief Medical Officer Michael O’Reilly in July 2013, and then in 2014, it hired Cercacor Chief Technical Officer Marcelo Lamego (Cercacor is a Masimo spinoff company). Masimo claims that the two former employees shared Masimo’s intellectual property when they developed the Apple Watch, which Apple denies.
Apple engineers are reported to be “racing” to make changes to algorithms on the Apple Watch that measure a user’s blood oxygen level — a feature that Masimo Corp. has argued infringes its patents.
