The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office officially published a series of 57 newly granted patents for Apple Inc. today. In this particular report we cover a motion and gesture system for a possible future Apple Watch and a design patent for a massive Apple iPhone retail display that's designed for store-within-a-store retail partners. Lastly, and as always, we wrap up this week's granted patent report with our traditional listing of the remaining granted patents that were issued to Apple today.

Motion and Gesture Input for Apple Watch

Apple has been working on a motion and gesture input system for a future version of Apple Watch dating back to at least 2016. Today's granted patent was first covered by Patently Apple in July 2019 as a patent application report titled "One Apple Watch Team Project is Advancing Motion and Gesture Input."

Apple's Erik de Jong is listed as one of the inventors and he's listed as the Apple Watch Product Design Lead working on future Apple Watch concept features. Today's granted patent generally relates to a possible future Apple Watch that will be able to detect a user's motion and gesture input to provide commands to the device or to other devices. In particular, Apple Watch can use one or more sensors to determine a user's motion and gesture input based on movements of the user's hand, arm, wrist, and fingers.

Apple's patent FIG. 4 below illustrates an exemplary configuration of an Apple Watch on a user's wrist.  

More specifically, when a user wants to perform any one of the movements illustrated in the figures below starting with FIG. 3A, fingers #402, wrist #420, and hand #404 can move when the user's brain sends electrical signals to stimulate muscles #430. The muscles then contract in response to the received electrical signals.

In response to the received electrical signals, the tendons (#410) attached to muscles (#430), can also contract or move and can cause to move a user's fingers, wrist, and hand. As the tendons contract or move, Apple Watch can detect the movement of the tendons, the electrical signal, or both.

Based on either the tendon movement or electrical signal or both, the Apple Watch is able to determine the user's motion and gesture. The motion and gesture can be interpreted as commands to the Apple Watch.

Apple's patent FIG. 5B above illustrates a top view of a wrist and an Apple Watch with motion and gesture sensing using optical sensors.

Apple was granted patent 10,671,176 today by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. It was originally filed in March 2019. You could review more details and patent figures in our 2019 report here.

Apple won a 'Retail Fixture' Design Patent

The Remaining Patents granted to Apple Today