A wearable from Whoop could one day tell an athlete how much oxygen their leg muscles are getting during an interval. The company received a US patent for the sensor on September 8. It filed the application in October 2020.
Most fitness trackers judge effort from the heart. Heart rate shows how hard the whole body works, but it reacts with a delay and says little about a single muscle. Muscle oxygen shows what happens locally: whether the tissue is still working aerobically, with enough oxygen, or has switched to anaerobic work.
Light at several distances
The patent describes an optical device with several light sources and several detectors placed at different distances from them.
From that, the patent says, it can estimate muscle oxygen saturation, oxygenated and deoxygenated hemoglobin and total hemoglobin, the protein in blood that carries oxygen. It covers readings both at rest and during activity.
A patent, not a product
Whoop has not announced a device built on the patent. A patent shows what a company wants to protect, not what it will ship.
The same month, Oura received a patent for a ring with a design that adapts to the finger, and Google published an application for measuring blood pressure without a cuff. For now, the oxygen reading stays on paper.
