Amazon's 2018 patents describe a wristband that tracks a warehouse worker's hand and nudges it with haptic feedback

According to NPR's 2018 reporting, the USPTO granted Amazon two patents for a wristband that locates a warehouse worker's hand in real time — via radio frequency or ultrasonic pulses — and delivers haptic feedback to steer the hand toward the correct bin or item. The patent numbers are US 9,881,276 ("Ultrasonic bracelet and receiver for detecting position in 2D plane") and US 9,881,277 ("Wrist band haptic feedback system"), both assigned to Amazon Technologies Inc. and granted 2018-01-30 — confirmed against the USPTO grants (via Google Patents) in the 2026-07-10 audit. The two patents split the tracking mechanism: US 9,881,277 uses radio-frequency tracking, US 9,881,276 uses ultrasonic position detection. Amazon framed the system as efficiency tooling; critics read it as a labor-surveillance device.

[quant confirmed; mechanism corrected — 2026-07-10 audit.] The two gaps the capture carried are now partly closed. The patent numbers — a Tier-1 quantitative claim — were confirmed against the USPTO grants themselves (US 9,881,276 and US 9,881,277, Amazon Technologies Inc., granted 2018-01-30). The mechanism description was corrected: the capture recorded ultrasonic tracking only, but the two patents split radio-frequency (US 9,881,277) and ultrasonic (US 9,881,276) approaches, and NPR itself reports "radio frequencies or ultrasonic pulses." A verbatim NPR phrase was still not captured at promotion; that residual verbatim-quote check stays routed to question-verify-amazon-wristband-patents-uspto.

Functionally the device is a digital-age restatement of the Gilbreth chronocyclegraph: both instrument a worker's hand to measure and optimize its path, a century apart. The lineage runs from Ford's assembly line through the Gilbreths' light-trails to this patent and, in its AI form, to Inertia-1 — the same efficiency instinct re-skinned in hardware and, later, in a foundation model.