Reservoir electrodes for electroencephalograph headgear appliance: Key Neurotech Patent #5

– Illus­tra­tive image from U.S. Patent No. 6,301,493

Today we are shar­ing a 2001 patent assigned to Sed­line, Inc. (As men­tioned, we are fea­tur­ing a foun­da­tion­al Per­va­sive Neu­rotech patent a day, from old­er to new­er by issue date)

U.S. Patent No. 6,301,493: Reser­voir elec­trodes for elec­troen­cephalo­graph head­gear appliance.

• Assignee(s): Sed­line, Inc.
• Inventor(s): Dominic P. Mar­ro, Thomas T. Wash­burn, Denis E. LaBombard
• Tech­nol­o­gy Cat­e­go­ry: EEG
• Issue Date: Octo­ber 9, 2001

SharpBrains’ Take:

While patents in the neu­rotech­nol­o­gy cat­e­go­ry of EEG are more fre­quent­ly being direct­ed towards either EEG sig­nal analy­sis and/or appli­ca­tions of EEG (e.g., secu­ri­ty appli­ca­tions, sleep appli­ca­tions, etc.), the ‘493 patent presents an EEG patent direct­ed towards aspects of the core EEG hard­ware. The ‘493 patent has a pri­or­i­ty date of 1999, when such EEG hard­ware dis­clo­sures began to be less promi­nent in the patent lit­er­a­ture. Despite hav­ing just two claims, the ‘493 patent is a key patent at least in part because of the use­ful inven­tive con­cept allow­ing easy and auto­mat­ic gel dis­pens­ing for wet sen­sors, as wet sens­ing often remains a nec­es­sary method for secur­ing high fideli­ty EEG sig­nal detection.

Abstract:

This inven­tion defines a sys­tem for mon­i­tor­ing the brain activ­i­ty of a human patient under anes­the­sia in order to deter­mine the patien­t’s lev­el of con­scious­ness. The sys­tem uses a plu­ral­i­ty of recep­tors which are mount­ed in pre­de­ter­mined anatom­i­cal posi­tions on the patien­t’s head. The recep­tors are secured by adhe­sive foam patch­es. The appli­ance fits snug­ly to the head with the aid of self-adjust­ing strip that car­ry imbed­ded elec­tri­cal cir­cuit­ry for the recep­tors. Elec­tri­cal con­nec­tiv­i­ty in loca­tions where scalp hair is most like­ly to be present is improved by the use of braille-tip elec­trodes fit­ted with large gel reservoirs.

Illus­tra­tive Claim 1. A recep­tor for col­lect­ing elec­troen­cephalo­graph­ic sig­nals com­pris­ing an approx­i­mate­ly hemi­spher­i­cal reser­voir with pres­sure opened par­tial­ly slit flat radi­al­ly arranged sur­faces on the side adapt­ed to be adja­cent to the patien­t’s head and con­tain­ing elec­trolyt­ic gel, the hemi­spher­i­cal reser­voir being pressed to deploy the elec­trolyt­ic gel.

To learn more about mar­ket data, trends and lead­ing com­pa­nies in the dig­i­tal brain health space –dig­i­tal plat­forms for brain/ cog­ni­tive assess­ment, mon­i­tor­ing and enhance­ment– check out this mar­ket report. To learn more about our analy­sis of 10,000+ patent fil­ings, check out this IP & inno­va­tion neu­rotech report.