Walk the independent claim. Vital Connect's grant US11534108B2, "Screening device, method, and system for structural heart disease" (issued December 27, 2022; inventors including Gabriel Nallathambi), is a granted patent. Its CPC mix — A61B 5/6801 for body-worn sensors, A61B 5/25 for bioelectric measurement, A61B 7/04 for heart-sound (phonocardiography) — signals a multi-modal clinical sensor.
The element that does the work is the screening purpose plus the modality combination. This is not a step counter that happens to read heart rate; the claim is directed at screening for structural heart disease, combining electrical and acoustic cardiac sensing in a wearable. That purpose-plus-combination framing is what distinguishes a clinical claim from a wellness one.
What it reads on is a medical-grade wearable patch or monitor used for cardiac screening — the category where wearables cross from consumer wellness into regulated diagnosis. Vital Connect operates in exactly that clinical-wearable space, and the claim protects the screening application its products perform.
The distinction the desk insists on — wellness versus diagnosis — maps onto a real regulatory and IP boundary. A consumer watch that flags an irregular rhythm sits at the edge of this territory; a device claimed for structural-heart-disease screening is across it. Reading the claim precisely keeps that boundary clear rather than blurring "heart sensing" into one undifferentiated bucket.
Scope discipline: the claim protects the recited screening device and method, not cardiac sensing generally and not consumer heart-rate features. A wellness wearable lacking the recited structural-disease screening combination operates outside it. The defensible element is the clinical screening purpose tied to the modality combination.
Granted status makes US11534108B2 enforceable, and for a strategist it marks where the wearable-health frontier actually is: not in counting beats, but in claims aimed at specific diseases. That is the territory with the deepest moats — and the heaviest regulatory weight — in the wearable space.