Photoplethysmography Patents: Top Companies & Filing Trends 2026
- Concentrated at the top. The five leading assignees hold 29.3% of all 1,429 records in scope, and the ten leading assignees hold 50.2% — filing here is a competition against a small group, not a fragmented field.
- Filing has cooled from its 2022 peak. Filings ran from 106 in 2017 to a peak of 132 in 2022, then fell 31% from 123 in 2021 to 85 in 2024 — the last year publication delay allows a clean read.
- Diagnosis claims dominate the classification mix. A61B (diagnosis & surgery) touches 73.8% of records, while sensor-adjacent classes like H01L and H10N sit under 5% each — hardware-level optical sensing is comparatively open.
Filing growth compares 2021 (123 records) with 2024 (85) — a three-year span. 2024 is the most recent year we treat as complete: publication lags filing by roughly 18 months, so 2025 onwards are still filling in and any growth rate that ends there would understate the field. Top-5 share is the combined record count of the five largest assignees divided by all 1,429 records in scope (CR5), not by the ranked leaders only.
What this landscape covers
Photoplethysmography (PPG) is the optical technique behind nearly every wrist-worn heart rate sensor: an LED shines light into tissue and a photodetector reads the light scattered back as blood volume changes. This landscape covers 1,429 published records filed between 2015 and mid-2026 that combine PPG or optical heart rate sensing with a specific engineering constraint — skin tone effect, motion tolerance, LED design, signal quality indexing, power budget, or regulatory clearance. That framing separates genuine sensing-and-signal-processing claims from the much larger universe of generic wearable patents.
The scope spans consumer wearables, clinical-grade monitors and the informatics layer built on top of them, which is why the technology composition below shows heavy overlap between diagnostic, computing and sports-equipment classifications rather than a single clean category.
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Filing trend and classification mix
Two views of the same 1,429 records: how filing volume moved year over year, and which IPC subclasses the claims actually sit in.
Filing trend, 2017–2026
Volume rose from 106 records in 2017 to a peak of 132 in 2022, then declined 31% from 123 in 2021 to 85 in 2024. 2025 and 2026 are shown but understated, since publication typically lags filing by about 18 months.
IPC subclass composition
A61B (diagnosis & surgery) appears in 73.8% of records, well ahead of G06F (17.9%) and G16H (12.5%). Because records can carry multiple classes, these shares sum to more than 100% — the useful read is relative weight, not a partition of the field.
Shares are the percentage of the 1,429 records in scope. A patent can carry several IPC classes, so the shares add up to more than 100%.
Go deeper on Photoplethysmography and Smartwatch Cardiac Sensing with Eureka
This page is one run against one query. Ask Eureka your own question about photoplethysmography and smartwatch cardiac sensing and every answer comes back with the patent numbers behind it.
Try EurekaMost-cited records and a representative filing
US20160022160A1 — Optical heart rate sensor
Filed by Shenzhen Goodix Technology, this record describes an optical heart rate sensor built around two LEDs, each driven by its own current pulse driver, modulating source light at a predetermined frequency toward a target measurement site. The dual-LED, dual-driver architecture is aimed at separating and reconstructing the color-response signal used to compute heart rate from ambient and motion noise.Abstract trimmed for length; full claim language is available in the source record.
| # | Publication no. | Patent title | Citations |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | US20140073486A1 | Systems, devices and methods for continuous heart rate monitoring and interpretation | 849 |
| 2 | US10137245B2 | Central site photoplethysmography, medication administration, and safety | 286 |
| 3 | US20160332025A1 | Wrist device | 163 |
| 4 | US20070149282A1 | Interactive gaming method and apparatus with emotion perception ability | 146 |
| 5 | US20170294174A1 | Display brightness updating | 138 |
| 6 | US20130276785A1 | Central Site Photoplethysmography, Medication Administration, And Safety | 134 |
| 7 | US20160022164A1 | Detecting fiducial points in physiological signals | 131 |
| 8 | US20170065224A1 | Wrist device | 123 |
| 9 | US10762990B1 | Systems and methods for identifying markers using a reconfigurable system | 122 |
| 10 | US20180156660A1 | Ambient light determination using physiological metric sensor data | 120 |
Citation counts favour older records simply because they have had more time to be cited — treat this as a signal of influence within the searched corpus, not 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 numbers mean for a filing decision
Three patterns worth acting on before drafting or freedom-to-operate work in this space.
A small group holds half the field
The five leading assignees account for 29.3% of all 1,429 records, and the ten leading assignees for 50.2%. That is a meaningfully concentrated field: a new entrant is not just filing against a long tail, it is filing directly into territory a handful of firms have staked out repeatedly.
Volume has pulled back from its peak, not vanished
Filings peaked at 132 in 2022 and fell 31% to 85 by 2024, the last year that can be read cleanly given publication lag. That is a cooling from a high point, not evidence the technology is being abandoned — the underlying claim space built through 2017-2022 remains in force.
Diagnostic claims dominate; device-level hardware is thinner
A61B touches 73.8% of records while H01L (semiconductor devices) and H10N (other solid-state devices) sit at 3.5-4.1% each. Most of the crowding is in how the signal is diagnosed and interpreted, not in the physical LED or photodetector hardware itself.
Eureka can read the same corpus for gaps instead of for coverage: under-claimed branches adjacent to photoplethysmography and smartwatch cardiac sensing, with the prior art for and against each one.
Who is filing, and where the activity has cooled
The ranked leaders span consumer electronics, sportswear and mobile infrastructure firms rather than a single medical-device category, and recent-year momentum has slowed even among the largest filers.
One filer sits well ahead of the field
The top-ranked assignee holds 124 records against a fifth-place figure of 68 and a tenth-place figure of 53 — a steep drop-off after the leader rather than a gradual taper.
Even active filers show flat or falling recent-year output
Recent-year momentum among named assignees ranges from flat (0% YoY) to a 33% year-on-year decline, with several previously prolific filers recording zero filings in the latest tracked year — consistent with the broader post-2022 pullback.
Co-filing is rare and mostly intra-group
Only four co-assignee pairs appear in the dataset. The strongest, at 16 shared records, links two entities within the same corporate family; the others connect a large electronics filer to academic and hospital partners at much lower volume.
| Assignee | Recent year | YoY |
|---|---|---|
| Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. | 2 | 0% |
| Whoop Inc. | 2 | -33% |
| Koninklijke Philips N.V. | 0 | — |
| Polar Electro | 0 | — |
| Nike Innovate C.V. | 0 | — |
| Nike, Inc. | 0 | — |
| Nokia Technologies Oy | 0 | — |
| Apple Inc. | 0 | -100% |
Where to take this analysis
The dataset points to a field with concentrated ownership at the top and thinner coverage in specific hardware and calibration branches.
Screen the under-claimed branches before drafting
LED drive modulation, skin-tone calibration and power-budget claims show materially lower density than the core diagnostic classifications — a faster path to a defensible first claim than filing directly against A61B.
Explore white space in EurekaMap freedom-to-operate against the concentrated leaders
With the top ten assignees holding 50.2% of all 1,429 records, a serious FTO review should start with their claim scope specifically, not a generic keyword search across the field.
Run an FTO screen in EurekaCommon questions about this landscape
This landscape identifies 1,429 published records filed between 2015 and mid-2026 that combine photoplethysmography or optical heart rate sensing with a specific engineering constraint such as motion tolerance, skin tone effect, LED design, signal quality indexing, power budget or regulatory clearance. That scoping excludes generic wearable patents that mention PPG only in passing. Because publication lags filing by roughly 18 months, the 2025-2026 counts in any trend view are understated and will rise as later filings publish.
The ranked leaders span consumer electronics, sportswear and mobile technology firms rather than a single medical-device category, and filing is concentrated: the five leading assignees together hold 29.3% of all 1,429 records, and the ten leading assignees hold 50.2%. The leading single assignee holds 124 records, well ahead of the fifth-place figure of 68 and the tenth-place figure of 53. This is a field where a small group of companies has built substantial claim density, so competitive analysis should start with their specific claim scope rather than the field as a whole.
Filing volume rose from 106 records in 2017 to a peak of 132 in 2022, then declined 31% from 123 records in 2021 to 85 in 2024, the most recent year that can be read cleanly given publication lag. That is a real pullback from the peak, not evidence the technology is being abandoned — the dense claim space built through the growth years remains in force and still needs to be cleared. Readers should treat 2025 and 2026 figures as provisional rather than a continuation of the decline.
The classification data shows heavy concentration in A61B (diagnosis & surgery, 73.8% of records) and comparatively thin coverage in device-level hardware classes like H01L and H10N, each around 3.5-4.1% of records. Sub-areas such as LED drive modulation for motion artefact rejection, skin-tone-adaptive calibration and power-budget optimisation for continuous sampling sit adjacent to the crowded diagnostic core but carry lower filing density. These are reasonable places to look first for a defensible first claim, though a formal freedom-to-operate check is still required before drafting.
US20160022160A1, assigned to Shenzhen Goodix Technology, describes an optical heart rate sensor using two LEDs each driven by its own current pulse driver, modulating source light at a predetermined frequency toward a measurement site. It is a specific dual-LED, dual-driver architecture for separating the heart rate signal from noise, not a claim over PPG sensing generally. Anyone designing a wrist-worn optical sensor should review its claims directly to confirm whether a single-LED, software-based noise separation approach, or a differently timed multi-LED drive scheme, falls outside its specific claim language.
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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.