Full Version: inventing 101
this is a thread on inventing and the critical thought that comes with it, it is a debate no different than a normal debate found in these threads. Ultimately you debate with the patent office and whomever is going to fund it.
I will propose two theory's/ideas for patenting, both are in the public domain for over a year now so technically they are no longer patentable, but with new additions they can be. The first one is a advancement in array processing hearing devices and the second is a drunk driver inhibitor using hand eye co-ordination.
so the question for the debate
1, are they patentable (if they were not disclosed)?
2, are they good products for the market?
let me make a second post on the specific details before the debate begins.
Are U.S. Innovators Losing Their Competitive Edge?
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/13/business...l?th&emc=th
November 13, 2005
Are U.S. Innovators Losing Their Competitive Edge?
I will propose two theory's/ideas for patenting, both are in the public domain for over a year now so technically they are no longer patentable, but with new additions they can be. The first one is a advancement in array processing hearing devices and the second is a drunk driver inhibitor using hand eye co-ordination.
so the question for the debate
1, are they patentable (if they were not disclosed)?
2, are they good products for the market?
let me make a second post on the specific details before the debate begins.
Are U.S. Innovators Losing Their Competitive Edge?
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/13/business...l?th&emc=th
November 13, 2005
Are U.S. Innovators Losing Their Competitive Edge?
Obviously only the patent office (or maybe a patent law expert) would know the answer to your first question.
The second is the more important. Passing the muster of a patent examiner is nothing compared to nabbing enough paying customers to make your idea feasible for the marketplace. First, is the problem serious enough that people will pay to have it solved? Take the number of people who might need this product and consider if there is anything else that is in any way comparable and available for a reasonable price today? It's cost to gains. Is there enough demand for your product? If using other measures for the hearing impaired today would suffice for (to use your example) hearing one's spouse in the kitchen, the only way they would pay for your necklace is if it were comparatively cheaper or much better than the other options.
The second is the more important. Passing the muster of a patent examiner is nothing compared to nabbing enough paying customers to make your idea feasible for the marketplace. First, is the problem serious enough that people will pay to have it solved? Take the number of people who might need this product and consider if there is anything else that is in any way comparable and available for a reasonable price today? It's cost to gains. Is there enough demand for your product? If using other measures for the hearing impaired today would suffice for (to use your example) hearing one's spouse in the kitchen, the only way they would pay for your necklace is if it were comparatively cheaper or much better than the other options.
Mind you this is not close to my areas I work in or studied, but demonstrates how I can jump in other fields with the top in the world.
It has to do with hearing. Here is a company working on a version right now. I have nothing to do with them.
HearingPoint Systems, Inc. FAQ... Francisco meeting honoring inventors, including father of Internet Vinton Cerf, his hearing-impaired wife steals spotlight with her new hearing array necklace. ...
http://www.hearingpoint.com/other.htm
This is how it works, as a hearing impaired person I without reading anything about hearing figured out a very newly understood phenomenon on a human hears with using two ears. That the brain actually does phase shifting to isolate sound for understanding. The concept of understanding how the human triangulates where a sound comes/direction from is very simple. The race timing condition of the sound is slow compared to the speed of electronics. This has been known for 80 plus years. What was only understood about 13 years ago was how the brain actually uses this race condition to phase shift noise so you can listen to a conversation in a noisy place like a bar to your right left or center. I figured it out on my own 10 years ago, too late to get the textbooks putting my name in it. But the way I figured it out was as a football game where I was talking to one of my fraternity brothers, who graduated number 3 at University of Illinois EE. Anyway I told him I can not hear in loud environments, I am functionally deaf in those situations. So he said he understood and he said he had spent half his career developing voice processors for voice recognition over the phone, and how background noise made it close to impossible with older processors. So it clicked in my head hmmm why can a human with two ears hear and separate noise but not on a phone. Later that same night we were in a bar and his wife said to me as again I am functionally deaf in bars that she has noticed that she can not hear as well in noisy environments like she could in the college days. So that was clue two, what changes when people get older. Well we lose some frequencies. So these are the frequencies that our brain wired to do the sound phase shifting was my guess that the brain does some phase shifting with two ears like a array. So went on the internet and I missed discovering that by it appeared three years, but the age part of frequency lock loss I may be the first on that issue. But not on the phase shifting out sounds.
So next as an inventor now understanding it hit me I could make a necklace array processor to remove background noise so checked on the web and sure enough a professor at Stanford was working on his first prototype that was already being tested. The concept is awesome on what it can do, I have tried hearing aids that transmit and they just amplify bad noise so worthless and that is the complaint of most people who try hearing aids. This product will revolutionize hearing. Here is a example, next time you are in a noisy environment and you are listening to a person 3 feet from you plug either ear and see what happens when you can not phase shift the noise out. This is how radio telescopes work, for an analogy.
Now here is where I have a way to make this work much more effectively but do not want to apply for a patent on it because I am not interested in developing it right now and the sooner it is out there the better for people and the cost of developing it are huge. .
Anyway this necklace is has some human factors problems it has to be directly incident to the sound source. Thus if the wife is in the kitchen and you are in the TV room it is not effective. I solve this by making the necklace completely around the neck 360 degrees of microphones and putting a dumb transmitter (ie does not transmit her voice, as that would be very aggravating) on the wife that allows the necklace constantly track where that person is via using ultrasonic and do the phase shifting of background sounds to optimize her direction. So when she does talk in our direction we actually phase shift to optimize her voice with the array. We could actually have a multiplexed one for when there is company over.
http://www.school-for-champions.com/senses/heardirection.htm
So that is an example of what I invent. Is it patentable? Is it marketable?. I have a 100% patent rate to date, so …. My only condition is unless someone has independently figured it out in the last 5 years since I did a patent check.
http://www-isl.stanford.edu/~widrow/paper.pdf
http://www.stanford.edu/dept/news/pr/01/widrow66.html
http://ccrma-mail.stanford.edu/pipermail/h...une/000005.html
http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/7076072.html
By the way this professor Dr. Widrow who has spent 40 years in array processing won a very distinguished award a few years back for this discovery that he beat me by a few years. The Franklin award
http://www.fi.edu/winners/show_results.faw...amp;name=Submit
The second invention
drunk driver stopper.
I came up with this concept in college. And when I got out of college I went to MADD to see if they would like to use it about 20 years ago. They were not interested as they believed stopping drunk drivers was just a enforcement and legislative issue. As we see it still has not stopped them. We have seen devices that you enter numbers on a keypad when you start the car. These disappeared 20 years ago. Now we have breath analyzers in cars. Which can be defeated and do not test how drunk a person is some people can be impaired at much low levels and people use balloons’ and such to fool the system.
My concept was to make a device that actually tests the hand eye co-ordination which is the issue that is critical, the ability to functionally effectively drive. I took two papertowel rolls and attached them to a black box and inside the box I put a mirror and a keypad with a joystick. with the joystick they had to press the numbers in a short time. Thus I gave a person a number and they had to press them without messing up hitting another area in x time. Well with the mirror reversing it it was very difficult. Half the people could not pass without a drink. But when a person had one or two drinks no one could pass. So I demonstrated the theory is or appears to be correct, but needed to make it easier. And with todays digital screens this would be easy to make a test that is not as complicated. Thee last time I did a patent search on this about 10 years ago there was still nothing doing the hand eye co-ordination check.
with regards to the first question.
You would be surprised that us lay people including you could do a good patent search to determine the patentability of an item. It is as simple as using the right keywords and doing a search. Just like you do here to back up your debates on google. The patent office has had this technology for 20 plus years. I will show you how. Go to the US patent office web site. http://uspto.gov/ go to patents, then go to 5 search patents. then go to quick search. in the two terms put in array and hearing for my example.
results are listed. then pick the ones that are closest and read them, if on target like the two below. you read the patents that they referenced and the ones that reference that one. Finding the closes ones you can and then list your arguments how yours is not anticipated by theirs and how yours is significantly novel and better. The examiner does the same thing and if he finds ones you did not site he gives a office action requesting you to argue how yours is different. His advantage is he has the so called library that when he finds the field he can leaf through the printed patents much faster than we can do on the web.
44 7,286,677 Full-Text Directional microphone assembly
45 7,286,675 Full-Text Audio signal processors
now you can do a preliminary patent search on any ideas you may have. If you determine you would want to move forward you would hire a patent attorney and have them do a search. I have only hired a patent attorney for one patent search, the first and done this for all others. I even write and file my own patents on my own at this point. And receive them. I have received every patent I have applied for to date.
I believe you are on target with all the above. The hearing aid industry is a huge market. as we know the elderly are the largest potential market. and as we know we are living longer and the baby boomers are hitting this area now, as people listened to louder music in this generation then the previous one. Hearing aids are selling for thousands of dollars for the upper end ones now.
though my example was only the kitchen one it is basically whenever you are with your significant other. so sitting next to you in a car, sitting next to you at a restaurant, walking next to you down the street, watching TV, and so on. Now since you are probably not hearing impaired like I am you will not understand the issue till I explain. As a hearing impaired person you learn that people do not like repeating themselves and actually get aggravated with you when it occurs. that is just human nature. So as a hearing impaired you act like you heard them to prevent them from getting upset. ever ask a person to repeat a joke when all are laughing, it does not have the effect. It does not matter if the person knows you are partially deaf the person will get tired of repeating. Hey I am the same way with my grandmother. What I did is bought a corded amplifier and always made sure she put it on and spoke right into it. She was much happier when I did this and it also amazed my aunt who at the time was taking care of her. My aunt was getting so frustrated with talking to her not knowing it was because my grandmother could not hear. It was not funny but my aunt would begin talking louder and with the talking louder she was getting visually upset at the same time. By teaching my aunt to always make sure the corded amplifier was in place and talking into the device my aunts stress level dropped. My grandmother had expensive hearing aids that just were not effective as I outlined. as noted they amplify the noise you do not want,
as I suggested go into a crowded noisy room or bar and plug one ear and listen converse/talk you will understand the brains ability to phase shift sound.
I also have a pet peave with hearing aids, to me they are barbaric. here you are losing your hearing and we know that loud noise causes/contributes to this and what do we do we pump in louder noise. it is quality not quantity...
It does not have to be a necklace it could be a hat, embedded in a jacket or shirt.
Now for the market, well just the necklace is a well liked by people who have tried hearing aids and who may be using them. these are good for face to face encounters. what percent of the time is face to face in communications? maybe 10%, so the other 80-90% is what this addresses. the problem with this is the cost to develop it to a decent product is 5 million to 50 million. depending on the tools out there. the actual cost of the product may not be expensive to manufacture, less than a hearing aid if in those volumes. the 5 to 50 million does not include marketing costs.
off topic but this is also the beauty of the internet, I was able to do a internet search to find someone was developing the necklace so I did not go and find funding to develop it and 3 years later find someone else was working on it before me. As my friend who graduated number three at U of I and worked half his career on voice recognition on the phone for the largest phone company in the world immediately grasped this concept and was willing to help find funding.
It has to do with hearing. Here is a company working on a version right now. I have nothing to do with them.
HearingPoint Systems, Inc. FAQ... Francisco meeting honoring inventors, including father of Internet Vinton Cerf, his hearing-impaired wife steals spotlight with her new hearing array necklace. ...
http://www.hearingpoint.com/other.htm
This is how it works, as a hearing impaired person I without reading anything about hearing figured out a very newly understood phenomenon on a human hears with using two ears. That the brain actually does phase shifting to isolate sound for understanding. The concept of understanding how the human triangulates where a sound comes/direction from is very simple. The race timing condition of the sound is slow compared to the speed of electronics. This has been known for 80 plus years. What was only understood about 13 years ago was how the brain actually uses this race condition to phase shift noise so you can listen to a conversation in a noisy place like a bar to your right left or center. I figured it out on my own 10 years ago, too late to get the textbooks putting my name in it. But the way I figured it out was as a football game where I was talking to one of my fraternity brothers, who graduated number 3 at University of Illinois EE. Anyway I told him I can not hear in loud environments, I am functionally deaf in those situations. So he said he understood and he said he had spent half his career developing voice processors for voice recognition over the phone, and how background noise made it close to impossible with older processors. So it clicked in my head hmmm why can a human with two ears hear and separate noise but not on a phone. Later that same night we were in a bar and his wife said to me as again I am functionally deaf in bars that she has noticed that she can not hear as well in noisy environments like she could in the college days. So that was clue two, what changes when people get older. Well we lose some frequencies. So these are the frequencies that our brain wired to do the sound phase shifting was my guess that the brain does some phase shifting with two ears like a array. So went on the internet and I missed discovering that by it appeared three years, but the age part of frequency lock loss I may be the first on that issue. But not on the phase shifting out sounds.
So next as an inventor now understanding it hit me I could make a necklace array processor to remove background noise so checked on the web and sure enough a professor at Stanford was working on his first prototype that was already being tested. The concept is awesome on what it can do, I have tried hearing aids that transmit and they just amplify bad noise so worthless and that is the complaint of most people who try hearing aids. This product will revolutionize hearing. Here is a example, next time you are in a noisy environment and you are listening to a person 3 feet from you plug either ear and see what happens when you can not phase shift the noise out. This is how radio telescopes work, for an analogy.
Now here is where I have a way to make this work much more effectively but do not want to apply for a patent on it because I am not interested in developing it right now and the sooner it is out there the better for people and the cost of developing it are huge. .
Anyway this necklace is has some human factors problems it has to be directly incident to the sound source. Thus if the wife is in the kitchen and you are in the TV room it is not effective. I solve this by making the necklace completely around the neck 360 degrees of microphones and putting a dumb transmitter (ie does not transmit her voice, as that would be very aggravating) on the wife that allows the necklace constantly track where that person is via using ultrasonic and do the phase shifting of background sounds to optimize her direction. So when she does talk in our direction we actually phase shift to optimize her voice with the array. We could actually have a multiplexed one for when there is company over.
http://www.school-for-champions.com/senses/heardirection.htm
So that is an example of what I invent. Is it patentable? Is it marketable?. I have a 100% patent rate to date, so …. My only condition is unless someone has independently figured it out in the last 5 years since I did a patent check.
http://www-isl.stanford.edu/~widrow/paper.pdf
http://www.stanford.edu/dept/news/pr/01/widrow66.html
http://ccrma-mail.stanford.edu/pipermail/h...une/000005.html
http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/7076072.html
By the way this professor Dr. Widrow who has spent 40 years in array processing won a very distinguished award a few years back for this discovery that he beat me by a few years. The Franklin award
http://www.fi.edu/winners/show_results.faw...amp;name=Submit
The second invention
drunk driver stopper.
I came up with this concept in college. And when I got out of college I went to MADD to see if they would like to use it about 20 years ago. They were not interested as they believed stopping drunk drivers was just a enforcement and legislative issue. As we see it still has not stopped them. We have seen devices that you enter numbers on a keypad when you start the car. These disappeared 20 years ago. Now we have breath analyzers in cars. Which can be defeated and do not test how drunk a person is some people can be impaired at much low levels and people use balloons’ and such to fool the system.
My concept was to make a device that actually tests the hand eye co-ordination which is the issue that is critical, the ability to functionally effectively drive. I took two papertowel rolls and attached them to a black box and inside the box I put a mirror and a keypad with a joystick. with the joystick they had to press the numbers in a short time. Thus I gave a person a number and they had to press them without messing up hitting another area in x time. Well with the mirror reversing it it was very difficult. Half the people could not pass without a drink. But when a person had one or two drinks no one could pass. So I demonstrated the theory is or appears to be correct, but needed to make it easier. And with todays digital screens this would be easy to make a test that is not as complicated. Thee last time I did a patent search on this about 10 years ago there was still nothing doing the hand eye co-ordination check.
QUOTE(Mrs. Pigpen @ Nov 18 2007, 08:42 AM) 
Obviously only the patent office (or maybe a patent law expert) would know the answer to your first question.
.
.
with regards to the first question.
You would be surprised that us lay people including you could do a good patent search to determine the patentability of an item. It is as simple as using the right keywords and doing a search. Just like you do here to back up your debates on google. The patent office has had this technology for 20 plus years. I will show you how. Go to the US patent office web site. http://uspto.gov/ go to patents, then go to 5 search patents. then go to quick search. in the two terms put in array and hearing for my example.
results are listed. then pick the ones that are closest and read them, if on target like the two below. you read the patents that they referenced and the ones that reference that one. Finding the closes ones you can and then list your arguments how yours is not anticipated by theirs and how yours is significantly novel and better. The examiner does the same thing and if he finds ones you did not site he gives a office action requesting you to argue how yours is different. His advantage is he has the so called library that when he finds the field he can leaf through the printed patents much faster than we can do on the web.
44 7,286,677 Full-Text Directional microphone assembly
45 7,286,675 Full-Text Audio signal processors
now you can do a preliminary patent search on any ideas you may have. If you determine you would want to move forward you would hire a patent attorney and have them do a search. I have only hired a patent attorney for one patent search, the first and done this for all others. I even write and file my own patents on my own at this point. And receive them. I have received every patent I have applied for to date.
QUOTE(Mrs. Pigpen @ Nov 18 2007, 08:42 AM)
The second is the more important. Passing the muster of a patent examiner is nothing compared to nabbing enough paying customers to make your idea feasible for the marketplace. First, is the problem serious enough that people will pay to have it solved? Take the number of people who might need this product and consider if there is anything else that is in any way comparable and available for a reasonable price today? It's cost to gains. Is there enough demand for your product? If using other measures for the hearing impaired today would suffice for (to use your example) hearing one's spouse in the kitchen, the only way they would pay for your necklace is if it were comparatively cheaper or much better than the other options.
I believe you are on target with all the above. The hearing aid industry is a huge market. as we know the elderly are the largest potential market. and as we know we are living longer and the baby boomers are hitting this area now, as people listened to louder music in this generation then the previous one. Hearing aids are selling for thousands of dollars for the upper end ones now.
though my example was only the kitchen one it is basically whenever you are with your significant other. so sitting next to you in a car, sitting next to you at a restaurant, walking next to you down the street, watching TV, and so on. Now since you are probably not hearing impaired like I am you will not understand the issue till I explain. As a hearing impaired person you learn that people do not like repeating themselves and actually get aggravated with you when it occurs. that is just human nature. So as a hearing impaired you act like you heard them to prevent them from getting upset. ever ask a person to repeat a joke when all are laughing, it does not have the effect. It does not matter if the person knows you are partially deaf the person will get tired of repeating. Hey I am the same way with my grandmother. What I did is bought a corded amplifier and always made sure she put it on and spoke right into it. She was much happier when I did this and it also amazed my aunt who at the time was taking care of her. My aunt was getting so frustrated with talking to her not knowing it was because my grandmother could not hear. It was not funny but my aunt would begin talking louder and with the talking louder she was getting visually upset at the same time. By teaching my aunt to always make sure the corded amplifier was in place and talking into the device my aunts stress level dropped. My grandmother had expensive hearing aids that just were not effective as I outlined. as noted they amplify the noise you do not want,
as I suggested go into a crowded noisy room or bar and plug one ear and listen converse/talk you will understand the brains ability to phase shift sound.
I also have a pet peave with hearing aids, to me they are barbaric. here you are losing your hearing and we know that loud noise causes/contributes to this and what do we do we pump in louder noise. it is quality not quantity...
It does not have to be a necklace it could be a hat, embedded in a jacket or shirt.
Now for the market, well just the necklace is a well liked by people who have tried hearing aids and who may be using them. these are good for face to face encounters. what percent of the time is face to face in communications? maybe 10%, so the other 80-90% is what this addresses. the problem with this is the cost to develop it to a decent product is 5 million to 50 million. depending on the tools out there. the actual cost of the product may not be expensive to manufacture, less than a hearing aid if in those volumes. the 5 to 50 million does not include marketing costs.
off topic but this is also the beauty of the internet, I was able to do a internet search to find someone was developing the necklace so I did not go and find funding to develop it and 3 years later find someone else was working on it before me. As my friend who graduated number three at U of I and worked half his career on voice recognition on the phone for the largest phone company in the world immediately grasped this concept and was willing to help find funding.
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