Monitoring physiological and health data via non-contact sensors: Key neurotechnology patent #33

Today we dis­cuss a neu­rotech patent very rel­e­vant to non-con­tact neu­romon­i­tor­ing sen­sors (as an alter­na­tive to skin-con­tact elec­trodes), which may play an impor­tant role in mea­sur­ing brain activ­i­ty in the near future.

U.S. Patent No. 7,485,095: Mea­sure­ment and analy­sis of trends in phys­i­o­log­i­cal and/or health data

• Inventor(s): Vladimir Shus­ter­man
• Tech­nol­o­gy Cat­e­go­ry: Hybrid
• Issue Date: Feb­ru­ary 3, 2009

SharpBrains’ Take:

The ‘095 patent describes teach­ings to address some of the med­ical treat­ment prob­lems asso­ci­at­ed with non-con­tact sen­sors, such as elec­tro­car­dio­graph­ic (EGG) and mag­ne­to­car­dio­graph­ic (MCG) sen­sors. Non-con­tact sen­sors, as an alter­na­tive to skin-con­tact elec­trodes, may play an impor­tant role in mea­sur­ing brain activ­i­ty. While non-con­tact sen­sors pro­vide advan­tages over con­tact sen­sors in that they can be used for extend­ed peri­ods with­out patient dis­com­fort due to skin irri­ta­tion, non-con­tact sen­sors have tra­di­tion­al­ly been either too large for prac­ti­cal use or pro­duce poor sig­nal detec­tion qual­i­ty. By con­sid­er­ing two lev­els of sig­nal analy­sis (with tech­niques sum­ma­rized in the abstract and recit­ed in the illus­tra­tive claim) the ‘095 patent dis­clos­es a sys­tem employ­ing non-con­tact sen­sors that is small enough to be portable but does not com­pro­mise sig­nal qual­i­ty. The improve­ment in the area of non-con­tact sen­sors that hold the poten­tial for advanc­ing brain-activ­i­ty detec­tion tech­nolo­gies, cou­pled with the exten­sive claims set com­pris­ing five inde­pen­dent claims cov­er­ing var­i­ous embod­i­ments and 35 depen­dent claims cov­er­ing var­i­ous fea­tures, are among the fac­tors mak­ing the ‘095 patent a key non-inva­sive neu­rotech­nol­o­gy patent.

Abstract:

Sys­tem com­prised of a portable med­ical device and method for reg­is­ter­ing at least one of elec­tro­car­dio­graph­ic (ECG), mag­ne­to­car­dio­graph­ic (MCG), phys­i­cal activ­i­ty, body posi­tion, res­pi­ra­tion, tem­per­a­ture, blood pres­sure, vaso­mo­tor activ­i­ty, blood flow, neur­al activ­i­ty, and oth­er phys­i­o­log­i­cal, and health data, extract­ing and rep­re­sent­ing the most sig­nif­i­cant para­me­ters from time series (trends) of said data. The sys­tem achieves the nec­es­sary sen­si­tiv­i­ty (sig­nal-to-noise ratio) in order to minia­tur­ize the device by col­lect­ing data of at least one fidu­cial point in a car­diac com­plex over a peri­od of at least one, and prefer­ably, sev­er­al sec­onds, and extract­ing the under­ly­ing typ­i­cal pat­terns from these data. Due to the minia­tur­iza­tion (pock­et-size), the sys­tem can be imple­ment­ed in a shape of a pen (or anoth­er minia­ture shape) that can be worn in a pock­et.

Illus­tra­tive Claim 1. A method for reg­is­ter­ing at least one of elec­tro­car­dio­graph­ic (EGG), mag­ne­to­car­dio­graph­ic (MCG), mechanocar­dio­graph­ic, bal­lis­to­car­dio­graph­ic data, phys­i­cal activ­i­ty, body posi­tion, res­pi­ra­tion, tem­per­a­ture, blood pres­sure, vaso­mo­tor activ­i­ty, phys­i­o­log­i­cal, and health data, extract­ing and rep­re­sent­ing the most sig­nif­i­cant para­me­ters from series of said data, said method com­pris­ing:

• col­lect­ing said data from at least one fidu­cial point in a phys­i­o­log­i­cal cycle over a peri­od of at least sev­er­al sec­onds;
• ana­lyz­ing said data in low-lev­el-of-detail to extract sig­nif­i­cant fea­tures from mon­i­tored sig­nals and com­pare said fea­tures with ref­er­ence val­ues, said low-lev­el-of-detail analy­sis applied local­ly, close to the point of data acqui­si­tion; and
• ana­lyz­ing said data in a high­er-lev­el-of-detail to iden­ti­fy at least one of short-term and long-term trends of changes in said sig­nif­i­cant fea­tures using at least one method select­ed from math­e­mat­i­cal decom­po­si­tion, math­e­mat­i­cal mod­el­ing,

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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.