US 2,012,083,705 · Filed 2011-11-15
The Body-Mounted Sensor Patent That Powers Modern Fitness Trackers
Imagine a small device that clips or attaches to your body and figures out what activity you're doing just by detecting where it is on you. This patent covers a system where a wearable monitor recognizes its own mounting position and then uses the right sensors to calculate your activity level—whether you're running, cycling, or climbing stairs.
The plain-English version
What it protects
The patent protects a system where a wearable device uses a unique signature or identifier built into a fixture (the part that attaches to your body) to detect its own position. Once the portable monitor recognizes this signature, it activates the correct set of sensors and algorithms to measure your movement and calculate activity data. What's covered is the combination of that position-detection mechanism with the sensor selection logic that follows—so unauthorized copies would need to avoid both the fixture signature system and the activity-calculation method tied to specific body locations.
Why it matters
This patent bridges the gap between generic accelerometers and context-aware fitness tracking. By having the device recognize where it's mounted on the body, the system can use smarter, location-specific algorithms—a wrist-worn tracker behaves differently from a hip-worn one. This allows a single device design to deliver accurate measurements across multiple body positions, which is valuable for companies building fitness trackers, smartwatches, and health monitors that need to work reliably whether clipped to a waistband, strapped to a wrist, or attached to an armband.
Real-world use
Every time you snap a fitness tracker onto your wrist or clip it to your pocket, the device internally checks where it is on your body and adjusts how it counts steps, estimates calories, or measures heart rate—all thanks to the location-sensing approach this patent describes.
Original USPTO abstract
The present inventions, in one aspect, is an activity monitoring system comprising a fixture having size/shape adapted to couple to a location on the user's body and a particular signature; and a portable monitoring device adapted to detect the fixture's particular signature. The monitoring device includes a housing that is adapted to engage the fixture; activity sensors, disposed in the housing, to detect activity of the user and to generate data which is representative of the activity of the user; and processing circuitry, disposed in the housing, to calculate an activity-related quantity of the user using the data which is representative of the activity of the user, wherein the processing circuitry: determines the monitoring device is engaging the fixture by detecting the fixture's particular signature, and, in response thereto, calculates the activity-related quantity using data from a set of the activity sensors.
Patent details
- Publication number
- US 2,012,083,705
- Filing date
- 2011-11-15
- Grant date
- Application — not yet granted
- Assignee
- Shelten Gee Jao Yuen / James Park / Eric Nathan Friedman
- Inventor(s)
- YUEN SHELTEN GEE JAO, PARK JAMES, FRIEDMAN ERIC NATHAN
- CPC class
- G16H40/67
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