Contributing to the Free Wearable Corpus

Thank you for considering a contribution. Before you write an entry, please read this carefully — the contribution model here is unusual.

What you are doing when you contribute

You are writing a defensive publication, not a Wikipedia entry.

Every entry in this corpus is, at the moment of timestamped release, a public disclosure citable as 102 prior art (or as a 103 element-disclosure that feeds the obviousness template) against any patent with a later effective filing date. That is the corpus’s reason for existing and the reason it works.

Tight, primary-sourced, element-by-element entries strengthen the commons. Sloppy citations, fuzzy dates, or hand-wavy prior art notes weaken it for everyone.

CC0 dedication

By submitting a contribution you dedicate it to the public domain under CC0 1.0. The contribution must be your own work or already in the public domain. Do not copy text wholesale from copyrighted sources — paraphrase in your own words and cite the source.

What counts as a good entry

An entry is commons-grade (draft: false, tier: 1) when it satisfies all five criteria:

1. The disclosure citation resolves to a primary source

disclosure_citation must point at something a third party can retrieve and verify:

  • Paper with a DOI or stable URL
  • Patent number
  • Book with an ISBN
  • TV / film with first-air-date
  • Episode ID
  • arXiv identifier
  • FDA 510(k) number / De Novo decision / PMA approval order
  • CE technical file reference where publicly available
  • IEEE / ISO / IEC / Bluetooth SIG standards document number
  • Archived URL (Wayback Machine snapshot with date)
  • GitHub commit at a specific SHA

Not acceptable: “Wikipedia,” “company website” without a specific page and date, “I read this somewhere,” uncited secondhand summaries.

2. The first disclosure date is defensible

first_disclosure_date is the earliest verifiable public disclosure, not the earliest plausible date.

If a wearable was demoed at CES in January 2018 but the company filed 510(k) clearance documentation that became public in November 2017, the November 2017 date is correct. If a sci-fi device first appeared in a 1956 short story that was later adapted into a 2002 film, the 1956 story is correct.

When in doubt, choose the earliest date you can cite to a primary source.

3. The prior art notes are element-by-element analysis

This field does the most work. prior_art_notes should read as the kind of analysis a competent patent examiner or invalidity-contention attorney would write. It identifies specific components disclosed — form factor, sensor modalities, algorithms, outputs, anatomical contact site — and what claims those disclosures could anticipate.

Bad example:

An early smartwatch with health features.

Good example:

Wristworn form factor with two-LED green-PPG (525 nm, 50 Hz sampling) over the radial artery, three-axis accelerometer, on-device HR derivation via peak detection in the 40-220 bpm band. Disclosed in product documentation dated 2014-09-09 and FCC filing TXR-MEMS-A1502. Anticipates wristworn green-PPG HR claims post-2014. The on-device peak-detection algorithm is not novel relative to the Allen 2007 PPG review (academic entry allen-2007-ppg).

If you cannot write the second kind, mark the entry draft: true and note in notes what work would be needed to clear the bar. Or submit it as tier: 2 — see Tiers below.

4. Sources are primary references

sources lists papers, patents, books, episodes, regulatory filings, or standards documents. Aggregators are acceptable only as supplements, not as the primary citation.

5. Patented entries enumerate patents

If ip_status is patented, then ip_citations must list at least one actual patent number.

Tiers

The corpus uses two tiers to allow density without editorial bottleneck.

Tier 1 (default, commons-grade): complete prior_art_notes, full multi-axis tagging, primary citations. Used as anchor entries in cross-cuts.

Tier 2 (reference-only): title, date, citation, bucket, minimal tags. Populates the long tail so that lookups don’t return empty. Marked "tier": 2. Still requires a resolvable primary citation but does not need full prior_art_notes. Useful for high-volume sources (FDA 510(k) predicate chains, large patent batches, academic-paper batch imports).

A Tier 2 entry can be promoted to Tier 1 by any contributor who writes the prior_art_notes.

Submitting an entry below the quality bar

Mark the entry "draft": true and document in notes what work would be needed to clear the bar. Drafts are welcome — they make incremental progress visible without polluting the commons-grade entry pool.

Practical workflow 

# Scaffold a new entry interactively
python3 tools/new_entry.py

# After editing corpus.jsonl directly or merging the scaffolded entry:
python3 tools/validate.py corpus.jsonl --strict
python3 tools/index.py .
python3 tools/cross_cuts.py

# Commit the regenerated artifacts alongside your entry.
git add -A
git commit -m "corpus: add <id>"

Choosing a good slug

The id field is a kebab-case slug used in lineage edges, cross-cuts, and citations.

  • Commercial products: <company>-<product> (e.g., fitbit-charge, whoop-4, oura-ring-gen3)
  • Academic platforms: <lab-or-institution>-<name> (e.g., epfl-eglass, openbci-cyton)
  • Fictional entities: <franchise>-<name> (e.g., dick-tracy-wrist-radio, geordi-visor-tng, rainbows-end-glasses)
  • Regulatory filings: <510k-or-de-novo>-<number> (e.g., 510k-k153026-zio-patch, denovo-den180044-irhythm)
  • Standards: <sdo>-<doc> (e.g., ieee-11073-10406, bt-sig-hrp)

Slugs are immutable once another entry references them. Choose carefully.

Multi-axis tagging

Every entry tags every axis it discloses. An EEG headband with on-device sleep staging would carry:

{
  "form_factor": "headband",
  "sensors": ["sensor-dry-eeg-electrode", "sensor-eeg"],
  "algorithms": ["algo-sleep-staging"],
  "output_modalities": ["audio", "data-only"]
}

Do not invent new tags casually. Propose them in a separate PR with a rationale and pinpoint to where the first entry to use the tag documents its scope.

Questions

Open an issue. Discussion of methodology, taxonomy gaps, and quality bar calibration is welcome.

Public domain (CC0 1.0). The corpus IS the prior art commons.

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