| | JULY 202419Apple can easily incorporate ActLight's DPD into its future smartwatch designs, and not only avoid Masimo's patent claims but come out with a superior device that could take market share away from MasimoActLight has recently become the sole owner of all granted and filed DPD patents worldwide.Specific to Masimo's patent, ActLight's DPD is not a photodiode. It differs from a photodiode by construction, operating conditions, and the measured parameters. ActLight's unique DPD has a P+NPN+ device structure (not a P+IN+ device structure), has forward-based operating conditions (not reversed-based), and is a time-triggered measuring system (not photocurrent-based).Page 89, 2nd paragraph of Masimo patent US010945648 B2 (i.e., '648) states: `In an embodiment, the front-end may comprise switched capacitor circuits that are configured to convert the output of sensor's detectors into a digital signal.'As the fund manager of the Quan Technology Fund, which is an investor in ActLight, I questioned ActLight's CEO on how its DPD technology gets around this broad 'detector' claim. The ActLight CEO responded, "DPD technology does not require any capacitor, and the output signal is already digital", removing the last doubt from my mind.Based on the facts above, I believe that a device such as the Apple Watch that uses DPDs instead of photodiodes could likely avoid an infringement with Masimo patents. Moreover, the high performance (high signal-to-noise ratio), minimal voltage, low cost, small size, tuneability, and direct digital output creates enormous advantages to the state-of-the-art photodiodes being used by Apple, Masimo and the industry today.The icing on the cake is that ActLight's DPD technology is licensed to a major Apple semiconductor supplier for heart rate monitoring, which has been thoroughly tested and is ready for volume production in April. Furthermore, a similarly designed peripheral oxygen saturation (SpO2) prototype was successfully tested at 110 dB. I witnessed the demo firsthand against the market leader's state-of-the-art blood oxygen sensor; ActLight's sensor was exponentially smaller, drew much less power, and reacted quicker to changes if needed (see side-by-side photos below).Thus, Apple can easily incorporate ActLight's DPD into its future smartwatch designs and not only avoid Masimo's patent claims but also come out with a superior device that could take market share away from Masimo.
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