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The companies after your eyes, your ears, and your heart.
Hello and welcome to Patent Drop, presented by The Daily Upside! Think of us as TDU’s cousin who can’t stop talking about what’s happening in Big Tech.
Today’s theme: From your eye movements to your breathing, companies are keeping track of your body. We’re diving into Amazon’s tightening grip on the telemedicine sector, Apple and Google’s new years fitness goals, and Zoom’s plan to force its users to make eye contact with each other. Let’s get into it.
#1. Amazon: Strike a pose and open wide
Amazon wants to know what hurts. The e-commerce giant filed a patent for telehealth tech that will help doctors get better photos of patients’ conditions.
Essentially, patients would be given automated instructions of exactly what to take photos of, how to take them, and send them to their doctor, giving them consistent images for analysis. For example, if a doctor wanted a photo of the back of your throat, Amazon’s system would give users both reference images and audible instructions on precisely what angle the user needs to take them from, as they take it.
“Existing telemedicine systems provide limited feedback to the patient capturing the image,” Amazon said in its application. “This leads to frustrating telemedicine experiences for both the patient and the doctor and can potentially lead to misdiagnoses and other mistakes.”

Amazon has been quickly growing its foothold in healthcare over the past few years. In late 2019 it opened Amazon Care, its in-house service offering in-person doctors’ visits, followed by the launch of Amazon Pharmacy in late 2020. Though it shuttered Amazon Care last August, its $3.9 billion acquisition of One Medical, a primary care provider with more than 750,000 customers, will more than make up for it (if it can make it through regulatory hurdles).
The trouble comes with balancing telehealth and in-person offerings, Cornelio Ash, equity analyst at William O’Neil, told me. Though telehealth exploded in the early days of the pandemic, putting all of your eggs in one basket has proven to not work, Ash said. Take the merger between virtual healthcare provider Teladoc and digital health management firm Livongo as an example: After an $18 billion deal in 2020, the company has taken billions in impairment charges and losses.
“The best fit is going to be a combination of in-person hospital care and telehealth,” Ash said. “It’s not going to just be virtual. Because other players in the market have made that mistake.”
The other problem: privacy concerns. Whether it be your health records logged with One Medical or the photo you took for your doctor of that mysterious rash on your leg, Amazon could have quite a lot of data about your body. Federal law restricts Amazon from using patient data outside of One Medical contexts, but with the company’s laundry list of privacy scandals from its other businesses, it may be met with some degree of skepticism.
#2. Zoom and Microsoft: All eyes on you
Nearly three years into WFH becoming the norm, video calls can still be awkward: Where are you supposed to look? At the camera, to make it look like you’re making eye contact even though you’re just staring at a little black dot? Or at the people on the screen, seemingly averting your gaze downward?
Zoom is trying to solve the awkwardness. The company filed a patent for tech that aims to increase eye contact among users by creating a draggable “active pane” in video calls (or one which shows the person that’s talking) which can be placed near the top or bottom of the screen, depending on where a user’s camera is. The purpose, the company said, is to make it look like participants aren’t “staring off into space” during important conversations.
Meanwhile, Microsoft is trying to solve the same issue in a different way. The company filed a patent for tech which applies “gaze adjustment techniques” to people in video conferences. These would track and modify the “eyes, head pose, and upper body portion” of a user to “introduce non-verbal communications that are typically lost in video conferencing application.” In layman’s terms, it organizes the screen for the speaker to make it look like all of the participants are looking at you, and puts up an “off screen” bubble over your face if it can tell that you’re looking away.
Whenever (or if ever) these solutions get implemented, it’ll be up to users to decide which they prefer. But Zoom and Teams have gone head to head since working from home became standard, and research shows that Zoom has remained on top, attracting millions more visits to its download page and more consistent search interest than its rival.
Either way, with many companies slowly but surely enforcing a return of in-office work, eye contact video conference tech might be replaced with IRL interactions in a year or so, anyways.
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#3. Apple and Google: Green juice, yoga, and constant monitoring
It’s that time of year: People are going hard on New Year’s fitness resolutions. And tech companies don’t want to be left out.
For starters, Google is looking into in-ear monitors that can be used as fitness trackers. Using an in-ear thermometer and other sensors, this device gathers data related to users’ breathing, eating, chewing, drinking, coughing or sneezing, and sends health information to their phone or smart watch. For example, this device could track calories burned throughout the day, or tell if a wearer is choking and call emergency services.
When Google’s not in your ear, it still wants to listen in. The company wants to patent technology that can track breathing data and respiratory rate using “sonar-based movement sensing.” Rather than wearing a smartwatch or monitor, this technology would be implemented into a device that stays near you, like a phone or smart home, to track breathing and movement to determine if something is off with your respiration rate. This invention might be coming sooner rather than later: In October, Google acquired Sound Life Sciences, a Seattle-based startup that built an app to monitor breathing.
Google isn’t the only one working on its fitness. Apple filed a patent for heat-activated electrodes that improve physiological measurements, including blood pressure and heart rate. These aren’t just to make the Apple Watch better: Some of the use cases Apple laid out include around-the-ear headphones, in-ear headphones and a scale.

Apple and Google have had very different approaches to the health and wellness wearables space, Bob Bilbruck, tech analyst and CEO of consulting firm Captjur, told me. While Apple has generally kept its health tech work in-house, Google has branched out, making partnerships with Samsung and acquiring FitBit to stake a claim in the smartwatch market. Though Apple’s electrodes will likely come with a big Apple logo, Google’s inventions might take the form of a FitBit or Samsung product, he said.
“Google’s kind of decided, ‘We don’t really need to own this space, we can provide technologies to enhance this space and let other partners go out and make the market,” Bilbruck said.
Either way, both companies have enough runway to try new things in health tech, even amid a looming economic recession, Bilbruck said. While companies like Peloton and Tempo have struggled as gyms reopened, people likely won’t stop wearing their smart watches.
Extra Drops
Lots of fun patents have been made public in recent weeks. Here are a few of our favorites:
Microsoft wants your John Hancock. The company filed a patent for secure digital signature technology to give people remote access to services or resources. Though the signatures are used as access keys, its interest in secure digital signing could signal an aim to compete with digital document companies like DocuSign and DocHub.
Ford is trying to give delivery drivers a boost of energy. The car manufacturer seeks to patent “light therapy” glasses for drivers that work night shifts, lighting up blue to combat the wearers’ fatigue symptoms. The glasses also collect data on driver tiredness and physical position, so as to not to flash light in their eyes while they’re on the road and cause the accidents they’re trying to prevent in the first place.
Both Meta and Google want to track your eye movement. Meta wants to track rapid-eye movement (a.k.a., what your eyes do in deep sleep) with a gel-electrode sleep mask. Though Meta discloses that this could be used in an artificial reality context, it didn’t go too deep into how. Meanwhile, Google aims to track users eye movements with a set of AR smart glasses, so it knows where to show you content when your eyes are darting around.
What else is new?
Microsoft plans to lay off 10,000 employees in response to the economic slowdown. The cuts mark the biggest layoff since the company cut 18,000 employees in 2014.
Semafor is contemplating what to do with Sam Bankman-Fried’s $10 million stake. The media startup is currently exploring new investments to replace it.
Crypto lender Genesis is preparing to file for bankruptcy in the coming days after seeing losses related to the fall of Alameda Research and Three Arrows Capital.
Twitter reportedly saw revenue fall 35% in the fourth quarter, a top executive told staff this week. The company has also begun auctioning off office supplies to cut costs, including the giant neon bird sign from its S.F. headquarters.
Mailchimp was hacked… again. The company was breach last week in seemingly the same fashion as a hack the platform experienced last April, it announced Tuesday.
Apple unveiled its newest HomePod smart speaker, and according to The Verge’s Chris Welch, it seems as though not much has changed from the higher-priced original.
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