Insulin Pump Patents: Who Leads, Where the Gaps Are 2026
- Concentrated at the top. The five leading assignees combined hold 45.0% of all 189 records in scope, and the leading ten hold 68.3%.
- Filing has cooled since its 2017 peak. Activity peaked at 31 records in 2017 and had fallen to 2 by 2026, though the most recent year is always undercounted due to publication lag.
- Control and informatics claims now rival the hardware. G16H healthcare informatics appears on 55.0% of records, close behind A61M body-fluid device claims at 82.5%.
What this dataset covers
This landscape covers 189 published patent records filed between 2015 and 2026 that combine insulin pump or artificial pancreas hardware claims with control-algorithm, CGM-integration, occlusion-detection, meal-announcement or patch-pump claims, restricted to the core device, diagnostic and healthcare-informatics IPC classes. Publication lags filing by roughly 18 months, so the 2025 and 2026 figures in any trend understate real filing activity for those years.
Records are drawn from receiving offices spanning the United States, Europe, WIPO's PCT system, China, Australia and Canada, giving a reasonably complete view of where applicants are seeking protection rather than just where the technology originates.
Filing trends and technology composition
Two views of the same 189 records: how filing volume has moved year over year, and which IPC subclasses the claims actually sit in.
Filing trend, 2017-2026
Filings peaked at 31 records in 2017 and declined toward the midpoint year of 2022 at 15, continuing down to 2 by 2026 — a flat-to-declining pattern rather than a growth curve, though the final years are undercounted by publication lag.
Technology composition by IPC subclass
A61M (devices for body fluids) appears on 82.5% of the 189 records, and G16H (healthcare informatics) on 55.0% — evidence that closed-loop claims routinely pair a delivery mechanism with a software or data-management layer. Because records can carry multiple classes, these shares sum to well over 100% and should be read against the 189-record total, not against each other.
Shares are the percentage of the 189 records in scope. A patent can carry several IPC classes, so the shares add up to more than 100%.
Go deeper on Insulin Pumps and Closed-Loop Systems with Eureka
This page is one run against one query. Ask Eureka your own question about insulin pumps and closed-loop systems and every answer comes back with the patent numbers behind it.
Try EurekaMost-cited records and a representative filing
US20150164414A1 — Recursive Real-time Determination of Glucose Forcing for Closed Loop Insulin Delivery
Presented is a computational system for predicting the blood glucose level to which a diabetic patient is being forced based solely on continuous glucose monitor (CGM) data that then allows optimum and safe calculation of a stabilizing dose to be applied by an insulin pump. This invention hence operates as part of a closed loop insulin delivery system. Included are recursive filters for estimating forthcoming blood glucose levels in real-time, designed to match typically observed human blood glucose rates of change due to food digestion and insulin injection.Filed by Matthews, Grant, 2015-06-18. Abstract truncated to the language available in the record.
| # | Publication no. | Patent title | Citations |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | US6135978A | System for pancreatic stimulation and glucose measurement | 581 |
| 2 | US9980140B1 | Secure communication architecture for medical devices | 564 |
| 3 | US20210236729A1 | Redundant staggered glucose sensor disease management system | 411 |
| 4 | US6093167A | System for pancreatic stimulation and glucose measurement | 345 |
| 5 | US20020026141A1 | System for pancreatic stimulation and glucose measurement | 205 |
| 6 | US20160038673A1 | Insulin time-action model | 146 |
| 7 | US20140221966A1 | Kalman Filter Based On-Off Switch for Insulin Pump | 125 |
| 8 | US20180369479A1 | Artificial Pancreas Integrated CGM Architectures and Designs | 108 |
| 9 | US20150190098A1 | Method, System and Computer Readable Medium for Adaptive and Advisory Control of Diabetes | 108 |
| 10 | US6558345B1 | System for delivering insulin | 108 |
Citation counts inside a searched corpus favour older records; treat them as a signal of influence on later filings, not as a measure of current commercial importance.
Each row carries its publication number; clicking a row searches Eureka by that number.
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Browse MCP servers →What the filing pattern says about the field
Four observations that follow directly from the concentration, technology-class and trend figures above.
The field is led by a small group, not a single dominant player
The five leading assignees combined account for 45.0% of all 189 records in scope, rising to 68.3% across the ten leading assignees. That leaves a genuine long tail of single- and low-filing entrants below the ranked leaders, rather than one company controlling the space outright.
Volume has cooled sharply since its 2017 peak
Filings peaked at 31 records in 2017, sat at 15 by the 2022 midpoint, and had dropped to 2 by 2026. That trajectory reads as flat-to-declining rather than continued growth, though the final years are understated by the usual 18-month publication lag.
Hardware claims still lead, but software is close behind
A61M body-fluid device claims sit on 82.5% of the 189 records, while G16H healthcare-informatics claims sit on 55.0% — a gap narrow enough that most serious filings now pair a delivery mechanism with an algorithmic or data-management layer rather than filing hardware alone.
Influence concentrates on a handful of older foundational filings
The most-cited records in this set are pancreatic-stimulation and glucose-measurement systems rather than recent software-defined algorithms, which is typical of citation counts inside a searched corpus: older filings accumulate citations simply by being available longer, not necessarily by being commercially dominant today.
Eureka can read the same corpus for gaps instead of for coverage: under-claimed branches adjacent to insulin pumps and closed-loop systems, with the prior art for and against each one.
Assignee concentration and where activity has gone quiet
The ranked leaders account for most of the volume, but recent-year momentum data shows even the largest filers slowing down.
One assignee leads by a wide margin over fifth place
The leading assignee holds 38 records against 10 for the fifth-ranked assignee and 8 for tenth place — a steep drop-off that marks this as a leader-plus-tail structure rather than an evenly spread field.
Even top filers show no recent-year activity
Recent-year momentum data shows multiple leading assignees, including the top-ranked filer, at zero records in the latest year — consistent with the overall decline from 31 records in 2017 to 2 in 2026, and a reminder that publication lag makes the newest year an incomplete picture.
Collaboration is limited and concentrated among a few names
Only five co-assignee pairs appear in the dataset, with the strongest pairings each sharing 8 co-filed records among a small cluster of related organisations — collaborative filing is the exception here, not the norm.
| Assignee | Recent year | YoY |
|---|---|---|
| Insulet Corporation | 0 | -100% |
| Bigfoot Biomedical, Inc. | 0 | — |
| Tandem Diabetes Care, Inc. | 0 | — |
| Animas Corporation | 0 | — |
| NUDGE BG INC | 0 | — |
| University of Virginia Patent Foundation | 0 | — |
| Guangdong Food and Drug Vocational College | 0 | — |
| Jin Haoyu | 0 | — |
Where to take this analysis
The figures above describe the field as a whole. Turning them into a filing or freedom-to-operate decision means drilling into specific claims and specific assignees.
Check claim scope before filing in a crowded class
A61M and G16H carry most of the density in this dataset. Before drafting in either class, review the actual claim language of the leading assignees' recent filings rather than relying on class-level counts alone.
Explore claims in Eureka →Track the assignees that have gone quiet
Several leading filers show zero activity in the latest year. That could mean a shift to trade secret protection, a licensing pivot, or simply lag — worth confirming with a direct assignee search.
Search assignees in Eureka →Map the under-claimed branches
Occlusion detection, patch-pump integration and meal-announcement fusion show thinner claim density than the core hardware classes. These are the branches most likely to reward a first-mover filing.
Map white space in Eureka →Common questions about insulin pump and closed-loop patents
The dataset's assignee ranking covers 60 companies, and the leading assignee holds 38 of the 189 records in scope, well ahead of the fifth-ranked assignee at 10 and the tenth-ranked assignee at 8. The top five assignees combined account for 45.0% of all records, and the top ten account for 68.3%. Below that leading group sits a long tail of assignees with only a handful of filings each, so the field has a clear leader-plus-tail structure rather than even distribution or single-company dominance.
Filing activity peaked at 31 records in 2017 and has declined since, sitting at 15 by the 2022 midpoint and falling to 2 by 2026. That is a flat-to-declining trend rather than continued growth. It is worth noting that publication typically lags filing by around 18 months, so the last one to two years in any trend chart will always look thinner than the true filing activity turns out to be once later publications catch up.
The dominant IPC class is A61M, covering devices for body fluids, which appears on 82.5% of the 189 records in scope. G16H, healthcare informatics, is close behind at 55.0%, reflecting how closed-loop systems now routinely combine a delivery mechanism with software-based dosing logic. A61B diagnosis and surgery claims appear on 31.2% of records, and G06F digital data processing on 21.2%, with smaller shares in control systems (G05B), medicinal preparations (A61K), electrotherapy (A61N) and digital transmission (H04L). Because a single record can carry several of these classes, the shares add up to well over 100% of the 189-record total.
US20150164414A1 describes a computational system that predicts a patient's forced blood glucose level using only continuous glucose monitor data, then calculates a stabilizing insulin dose for delivery through a pump as part of a closed-loop system. Its core technical contribution is a pair of recursive exponential filters, tuned to the observed rates of change from food digestion and insulin action, applied to low-pass filtered CGM data ahead of the dosing calculation. Anyone designing a CGM-driven dosing algorithm that relies on similar real-time forecasting from raw CGM data should review this filing's claim scope before finalising their approach, since it sits squarely in the algorithmic core of closed-loop delivery rather than in peripheral hardware.
The evidence points to several branches with thinner claim density than the dominant A61M-plus-G16H combination: occlusion detection built on pressure-waveform analysis, patch-pump form factors with integrated CGM, meal-announcement claims that fuse user interface and algorithm design, closed-loop control framed under G05B regulatory-systems language, and delivery systems that overlap with A61N electrotherapy claims. None of these are unclaimed, but each shows meaningfully less filing density than the core hardware and informatics classes, which is where a narrowly drafted first claim is more likely to clear prior art cleanly.
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Disclaimer. This page is generated from Patsnap Eureka data drawn from a limited snapshot of global patent and scientific-literature records, and is provided for general information and reference only.
Patent data carries inherent limitations: recent filings (typically the most recent 18–24 months) are under-counted due to standard publication lag; counts may be reported at either a patent-family or a patent-record basis and are not always directly comparable; classification, applicant-name, and citation data may contain errors, duplicates, or omissions; and the underlying search query defines and constrains the scope shown. As a result, the analysis may be incomplete or inaccurate and may not reflect the full technology landscape.
Nothing on this page constitutes an exhaustive prior-art, novelty, freedom-to-operate, or validity search, nor does it constitute legal, financial, investment, or professional advice, and it should not be relied upon as such. Any patent, commercial, or strategic decision should be verified independently and reviewed with qualified patent, legal, and domain professionals. Patsnap makes no warranties, express or implied, as to the accuracy, completeness, or fitness for any particular purpose of the information presented.
Machine translation. Assignee and organisation names originally recorded in Chinese, Japanese or Korean have been rendered into English by an AI translation step so that the tables stay readable. These renderings are best-effort and may not match a company’s registered English name; the original name is what the underlying patent record carries, and it is what any Eureka query launched from this page uses.