Next: Will brain sensors be able to infer the mental state of a person–and, for example, identify sarcasm in a message?

-– Illus­tra­tive image from U.S. Patent No. 8,082,215

Today we high­light a thought-pro­vok­ing patent by Intel­lec­tu­al Ven­tures. (As men­tioned, we are fea­tur­ing foun­da­tion­al Per­va­sive Neu­rotech patents–from old­er to new­er by issue date–to gain a glimpse into future applications)

U.S. Patent No. 8,082,215: Acqui­si­tion and par­tic­u­lar asso­ci­a­tion of infer­ence data indica­tive of inferred men­tal states of author­ing users

• Assignee(s): The Inven­tion Sci­ence Fund I, LLC (Intel­lec­tu­al Ventures)
• Inventor(s): Edward K. Y. Jung, Eric C. Leuthardt, Royce A. Levien, Robert W. Lord, Mark A.
• Mala­mud, John D. Rinal­do, Jr., Low­ell L. Wood, JR.
• Tech­nol­o­gy Cat­e­go­ry: Neuro-monitoring
• Issue Date: Decem­ber 20, 2011

SharpBrains’ Take:

Focused on eval­u­at­ing the men­tal state of a mes­sage’s author, the ‘215 patent describes some inter­est­ing aspects of neu­rotech­nol­o­gy that make the patent note­wor­thy. Elec­tron­ic com­mu­ni­ca­tion has become per­va­sive in soci­ety, but the intent of the mes­sage may be “lost” in  trans­mis­sion, for exam­ple when an email or text recip­i­ent inter­prets a mes­sage as lit­er­al despite the sender’s intent of sar­casm. The ‘215 patent describes a method for infer­ring data, for exam­ple through EEG or fMRI sen­sors, asso­ci­at­ed with the men­tal state of an author of an elec­tron­ic mes­sage and iden­ti­fy­ing a con­gruity (or incon­gruity) between that men­tal state and inferred men­tal state from the com­mu­ni­ca­tion itself. The broad inde­pen­dent claims along with the exten­sive spec­i­fi­ca­tion (span­ning 57 illus­tra­tion sheets and 41 pages of writ­ten mate­r­i­al) are among the fac­tors mak­ing the ‘215 patent com­pelling. The ‘215 patent is assigned to the Inven­tion Sci­ence Fund I which is owned and man­aged by Intel­lec­tu­al Ven­tures — one of the top five US patent hold­ers as of 2011.

Abstract:

A com­pu­ta­tion­al­ly imple­ment­ed method includes, but is not lim­it­ed to: acquir­ing a first infer­ence data indica­tive of an inferred men­tal state of a first author­ing user in con­nec­tion with a par­tic­u­lar item of an elec­tron­ic mes­sage, acquir­ing a sec­ond infer­ence data indica­tive of an inferred men­tal state of a sec­ond author­ing user in con­nec­tion with the par­tic­u­lar item of the elec­tron­ic mes­sage; and asso­ci­at­ing the first infer­ence data and the sec­ond infer­ence data with the par­tic­u­lar item. In addi­tion to the fore­go­ing, oth­er method aspects are described in the claims, draw­ings, and text form­ing a part of the present disclosure.

Illus­tra­tive Claim 1. A sys­tem, comprising:

• an infer­ence data acqui­si­tion mod­ule con­fig­ured to acquire infer­ence data includ­ing a first infer­ence data that indi­cates an inferred men­tal state of a first author­ing user in con­nec­tion with a par­tic­u­lar item of an elec­tron­ic mes­sage and a sec­ond infer­ence data that indi­cates an inferred men­tal state of a sec­ond author­ing user in con­nec­tion with the par­tic­u­lar item of the elec­tron­ic mes­sage; and
• an infer­ence data asso­ci­a­tion mod­ule con­fig­ured to asso­ciate the first infer­ence data and the sec­ond infer­ence data with the par­tic­u­lar item.

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.