Oura says Ultrahuman’s Ring Pro redesign still infringes two patents

The story

Oura has sued Ultrahuman over the redesigned Ring Pro, alleging that the smart ring infringes two U.S. patents covering different layers of the product: its ornamental appearance and a functional arrangement of battery, electronics and health sensors. The complaint, filed October 22 in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, seeks damages and a permanent injunction. Those remedies are requests, not current restrictions. Ultrahuman says Ring Pro remains available in the United States and that it will contest the allegations.

The first asserted right, U.S. Design Patent D804,471, protects the ornamental design of a wearable computing device as shown in six drawings. Design patents are not claims to every ring-shaped computer. Their scope turns on the patented visual design, including the solid-line features shown in the drawings, and on how an ordinary observer would compare that design with the accused product. The patent issued in December 2017 and was assigned to Oura in 2023 after originating with wearable-device company Motiv.

The second, U.S. Patent 12,769,363, is a utility patent directed to functional architecture. Its first claim describes a ring-sized housing, a curved battery, power-management electronics, charging magnets and a circuit board arranged around the housing. It also requires motion sensing, skin-temperature sensing, visible and infrared or near-infrared emitters, and a light sensor supporting heart-rate detection. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office issued the patent on October 20—two days before Oura filed suit.

That short interval is striking, but it does not mean the invention was conceived this month. The USPTO’s Official Gazette shows that the patent is part of a long chain of continuation and divisional applications, with claimed priority reaching provisional filings from November 2013 and June 2014. Continuation practice lets an applicant pursue additional claims supported by an earlier disclosure while keeping a related application family alive. The new legal instrument is therefore a recently granted set of claims built on an older technical lineage.

Oura also named SVTronics, which it alleges manufactures Ring Pro in Plano, Texas, under Ultrahuman’s direction. Including the manufacturer extends the case beyond retail sales to alleged domestic making and supply-chain activity. These remain allegations. Neither defendant has been found to infringe the two patents, and the court has not yet interpreted their scope, assessed validity or compared the accused ring with every element of the utility claims and the design drawings.

The case follows an earlier Oura victory before the U.S. International Trade Commission. In 2025 the Commission found a Section 337 violation involving imported smart rings and issued exclusion and cease-and-desist orders tied to U.S. Patent 11,868,178. Ultrahuman later redesigned its product, and U.S. Customs cleared Ring Pro as outside the scope of that earlier order. That clearance mattered for the patent and product configuration Customs examined; it did not decide infringement of every other patent in Oura’s portfolio.

This distinction is the central engineering issue. A design-around is a legitimate and important function of the patent system: competitors can study public claims and build a product that avoids them. But clearance against one claim set is not blanket permission for the entire device. A compact smart ring concentrates industrial design, curved energy storage, charging, optical sensing, temperature measurement, motion tracking and wireless electronics into a few millimetres. Different patent families can attach to different choices inside the same small volume.

Oura says Ring Pro still uses protected design and technology despite Ultrahuman’s changes. Ultrahuman chief executive Mohit Kumar told TechCrunch that the company is confident in the product and will defend its position, emphasizing that one asserted patent issued only two days before the suit. The parties’ statements frame the dispute but do not resolve it. The court will need evidence about the actual product, the prosecution history and prior art, not just competing descriptions of who innovated first.

INNOVOX analysis: this lawsuit tests the economic meaning of redesign in a crowded hardware category. If a rival can escape an exclusion order only to face a newly issued continuation patent covering another layer of the product, freedom to operate becomes an ongoing process rather than a single clearance exercise. That can protect accumulated research and encourage genuinely different architectures. It can also steer smaller competitors toward licences or repeated litigation, concentrating control over a category whose basic form factor leaves little physical room for alternative layouts.

What to watch next is whether Oura seeks preliminary relief before a full trial and how Ultrahuman answers each patent separately. For the design patent, comparisons among drawings, prior ring designs and Ring Pro’s overall appearance will matter. For the utility patent, the fight should become more granular: dimensions, component placement, charging structures and sensor combinations. Validity and priority challenges may be as important as non-infringement. Until the court rules or the parties settle, Ring Pro’s U.S. availability is unchanged and Oura’s new claims remain unproven.

INNOVOX analysis

The dispute illustrates why a successful design-around is claim-specific rather than a general immunity certificate. Smart-ring makers must navigate exterior appearance, internal packaging and sensing architectures across overlapping patent families. That can reward genuine alternative engineering, but a large continuation portfolio can also raise entry and licensing costs long after a product category takes shape.

What to watch

Watch for Ultrahuman’s answer, any request for a preliminary injunction, claim-construction positions, comparisons between the patent drawings and Ring Pro, and challenges to validity or priority. Technical evidence about the curved battery, circuit board, charging magnets and sensor layout will determine whether the redesign is legally distinct.