The house discipline governs the headline: Samsung has granted patents here, so I will not soften it to "has filed." Both records carry B2 kind codes and 2026 issue dates. Samsung's grant US12557995B2, "Bio-information estimating apparatus and bio-information estimating method" (issued February 24, 2026), and US12543963B2, "Apparatus and method for estimating bio-information" (issued February 10, 2026), both assignee Samsung Electronics, both in CPC A61B 5/02116 — blood-pressure measurement.
What the claims reach, in plain language: estimating blood pressure without a cuff. A traditional measurement inflates a cuff to occlude the artery and reads the pressure at which blood flow returns. A wrist wearable cannot do that, so it infers blood pressure from optically sensed signals — the shape and timing of the pulse waveform measured through the skin — mapped to pressure by a calibrated model. The grants classify to A61B 5/02225 and 5/0261 alongside 5/02116, which is the optical-pulse-to-pressure estimation art.
Why granted-vs-pending is the whole story in this category. Cuffless blood pressure is medically fraught and commercially coveted — it is the feature that would let a watch do something a phone cannot. Many players have applications pending; far fewer have issued claims, because examiners scrutinize the estimation methods hard. Samsung holding two granted patents on the estimation apparatus and method, weeks apart in early 2026, is a materially stronger position than a stack of publications would be. Issued claims can be asserted; pending applications cannot.
The scope caution a litigator-trained editor insists on: these claims cover specific estimation apparatus-and-method configurations, not "measuring blood pressure from a watch" in the abstract. A competitor using a different estimation pipeline — different signal features, different calibration architecture — may not read on them. The grants are valuable and enforceable, but their scope is bounded by the claimed method, and an infringement read has to walk the actual limitations, not the marketing category.
For the litigation-watcher, the read is this: wrist-based blood pressure has the ingredients of the next sensor fight — a coveted feature, a crowded field, and now issued claims to assert. The Masimo/Apple pulse-oximetry saga is the template for how a wearable sensor dispute escalates to an import posture. Samsung's pair of granted estimation patents is the kind of asset that, in that template, becomes a sword.