The wearable industry is spending serious money on lawyers right now.

Zepp Health filed a patent infringement suit against Oura in Texas on April 21, claiming the Oura Ring Gen 3, Gen 4, and the Oura app infringe six patents covering activity tracking, sleep monitoring, stride length, and health risk scoring. Oura had already filed a complaint with the International Trade Commission — a federal agency that can block infringing products from being imported into the US — against Samsung, Reebok, Zepp Health, and Nexxbase, plus a parallel case in Texas asserting eight patents against Zepp. The ITC trial is scheduled for July 2026. Oura recently dropped 22 patent claims and one entire patent from the ITC case.

WHOOP is fighting on a different track. It sued Polar in October 2025 over the Polar Loop's screenless band design, claiming the look infringes WHOOP's trade dress — the legal term for a product's distinctive visual identity, separate from any patent on how it works. Polar denies it. WHOOP also sued Bevel, an AI health coaching app, on similar grounds, and won a preliminary injunction against Chinese manufacturer Lexqi in February over a lookalike tracker. WHOOP is also reportedly heading toward an IPO after raising $575 million in March, which is the kind of moment when companies clean up their IP exposure.

Almost every player in the sleep and recovery wearables space is either suing someone or being sued.

A ring is a ring. A screenless band is a screenless band. Sleep scores and recovery metrics look similar across brands because the underlying ideas about how to measure them are similar. When products stop differentiating, patents start mattering.

For anyone wearing an Oura Ring right now, nothing changes. But if Zepp wins meaningful ground on any of those six patents, the next generation of Oura hardware gets harder to design, harder to ship, and probably more expensive. The same logic runs in reverse for Zepp.

Apple knows this game. Masimo, a medical device company that makes hospital-grade pulse oximeters, took Apple to court over the blood oxygen sensor on the Apple Watch. Masimo won an ITC import ban in late 2023 that forced Apple to disable the feature on Series 9 and Ultra 2 watches sold in the US for roughly 18 months. Apple eventually shipped a software workaround that moved the calculation to the paired iPhone, and the ITC closed the case in April 2026 after ruling the redesign does not infringe. A separate federal jury awarded Masimo $634 million, which Apple is appealing.

The Oura-Zepp fight looks a lot like that, just with smaller companies. Apple could afford to lose blood oxygen on the Apple Watch for a year and a half because it has the iPhone keeping the lights on. Oura and Zepp do not have anything that big to fall back on.

Right now, what these companies build next depends on what their lawyers win.