Temporary Tattoo Biosensor
FedInvent Patent Report for Tuesday, November 30, 2021
Hello from FedInvent,
The Patent Office granted 6,760 new patents on Tuesday, November 30, 2021. One hundred twenty-eight (128) benefitted from taxpayer funding.
The FedInvent Patent Report is available here. If you prefer to browse the details by department, you can start here.
This Tuesday's patents are an unusual portfolio of new inventions. The collection includes several new medical devices, MRI technology, new microfluidics, an arthropod repellent, and automated techniques for fitting flanges to tubes make tubular structures like wind towers and pipelines. There is plenty of genetic engineering inventions, including a new patent from Nobel Prize winner Emmanuelle Charpentier.
A Few Highlights:
Temporary Tattoo Biosensors
A Rare Earth Triple Play
Quieting the Mowers and Blowers
The Innovation Agenda
Patents By The Numbers
Temporary Tattoo Biosensors
The Office of Naval Research funded work done at the University of California San Diego to develop a new way of fabricating and using electromechanical and chemical biosensors that can be attached to your skin the same way you attach a temporary tattoo.
The biosensor is applied to the skin using a damp water-infused cloth or sponge. Next, the backing layer of the sensor device is peeled away, leaving only the functional printed sensor pattern and a water-soluble synthetic polymer binder. The novel sensors can be used in noninvasive on-body continuous monitoring in healthcare, fitness, remote monitoring, and other applications.
Biosensors are analytical devices that convert a biological response into an electrical signal. The new biosensors invented here epidermal biofuel cells to form an on-body, wearable complete self-powering monitoring system. The sensor can be deployed in a body-worn article, such as clothing, a wristband, a wristwatch, a piece of footwear, or a monitoring device.
The new sensor can be customized using artistic electrode patterns that conceal their electrochemical functionality like a temporary tattoos' creative design.
The inventors have addressed the mechanical strain of using a biosensor attached to the skin — humans do a lot of stretching, bending, and twisting. One of the features of the invention is the ability to use carbon-fiber-reinforced tattoo inks in making the temporary tattoo-like sensors to provide the durability required to withstand the mechanical stresses of wearing a sensor on one's skin.
The user-friendly design and ease of use of this biosensor and its self-powering fuel cell make it a highly desirable technology for other uses — glucose detection to relieve people with diabetes of the finger-sticking routine or use of clumsy wearable glucose monitoring.
The new biosensor device can potentially be used to detect volatile organic compounds, explosive remnants, and pollutants present in the air surrounding the device on the user's skin. The Department of Defense is conducting research to find effective ways to detect and selectively identify biowarfare agents, bacteria (vegetative and spores), toxins, and viruses posing threats in virtually real-time. Biosensors are a critical element of achieving this goal. The new biosensor can be used for real-time pH monitoring of human perspiration during strenuous physical activity. The Department of Defense has funded other work on sensors to detect exertion and heat exposure and the ability to analyze fitness and physical stress.
A Triple Play of Taxpayer-Funded Rare Earth Extraction Patents
The Department of Energy (DOE) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) fund fundamental science, technology development, and bench- and small-scale production of critical minerals and materials, including producing rare earth elements (REEs) from unconventional sources (e.g., coal and coal byproducts), improving rare earth separation processes, and developing new uses for co-products (e.g., cerium from rare earth element mining). Accessibility to a reliable supply chain of rare earth materials is essential to maintaining US competitiveness in a range of technologies — missile guidance systems, smartphones, night vision devices, and permanent magnets. The availability of rare earth metals is also needed to meet the Biden Administration's climate change objectives. Finding domestic approaches to REEs is a national security priority.
Tuesday was a rare earth R&D trifecta. USPTO granted three new patents for methods of extracting rare earth metals and oxides that US taxpayers funded.
Oak Ridge National Lab received US patent 11186893, "Rare Earth Amide Compositions." Oak Ridge National Lab is a DOE federally funded research and development center.
The NSF Division of Chemical, Bioengineering, Environmental, and Transport Systems funded a novel way to extract rare earth metals from industrial waste coal ash. Purdue University's newly granted patent 11186894, "Preparation of Rare Earth Metals and Other Chemicals from Industrial Waste Coal Ash."
Patent 11186895, "Continuous Solvent Extraction Process for Generation of High-Grade Rare Earth Oxides From Leachates Generated From Coal Sources," was granted to inventors from the University of Kentucky. DOE and NSF funded the work that led to this invention.
We wrote about University of Wyoming researchers Dr. Maohong Fan and Zaixing Huang patent application, "Methods and Apparatus for Separation of Rare Earth Elements From Coal Ash" back in the November 14th newsletter. Their application covers methods for separating rare earth elements from coal, coal byproducts, and coal-derived products. Their work was also funded by the DOE.
R&D on rare earth elements will continue to be a major research and development priority.
Quieting the Mowers and Blowers
The Army Research Lab received US patent 11187136, "Vorticity Based Noise Abatement." Vorticity is a whirling motion of fluid or air. The Army invented a way to use airflow to quiet things down and create a better muffler for their vehicles. Very nice, but was it newsletter worthy? Then we came across the following in the detailed description:
"The embodiments herein may apply to cars, trucks, ATVs, UAVs and other air or ground vehicles, recreational equipment, lawnmowers, weed and grass trimmers, generators, chainsaws, blowers, heavy machinery, pumps, and any noisy source."
Noise abatement technology that would quiet down the mowers and blowers alone made it worth a read. The Army Research Lab needs to commercialize this innovation immediately.
The Innovation Agenda
Buried in the email box between notices that UPS and Amazon will be making deliveries tomorrow and an update from Chainalysis that there is a lot of regulatory activity happening around stable coins and cryptocurrency, an email from USPTO appeared. The Patent Office has released its 2021 Patent Public Advisory Committee (PPAC) Annual Report. We're still working our way through the report. On our first pass, two items jumped out — the number of patent filings and unexamined application inventory and USPTO's transition to DOCX for filing patent applications.
The Count
There were 450,976 patent application filings in FY 2020. FY 2021 filings were 450,436. A slight drop. Considering that the world was in full-on COVID mode in 2020, the numbers aren't bad. The Office expects the filings to be up 1.5% year over year in 2022. The inventory of unexamined patent applications was 642,450 at the end of the fiscal year. Today, November 30, 2021, the inventory was 652,194. Seventeen months of work for patent examiners.
DOCX
Then there is the matter of the Patent Office's transition to DOCX as the format for filing a patent application. The PPAC report states what practitioners know. There has been substantial resistance by the user community to this change in formats for Office Submissions. (Has anyone at USPTO tried to add a complex formula to a DOCX file?)
Another clue that things aren't going well here is that only 13,000 people have attended DOCX training at USPTO. There will continue to be substantial resistance to filing your most important intellectual property documents in a proprietary word processing format. (Yes, WORD is still a proprietary format.)
The PPAC released its 2021 report in PDF format. USPTO believes that DOCX is great for presenting an entity's most important intellectual property to the Patent Office. Why doesn't USPTO release all of its publicly available reports in DOCX format to reinforce its commitment to this format? Hmmmmm.
Bayh-Dole Scofflaws
There is only one Bayh-Dole scofflaw this week. Raytheon Company, our favorite, makes another appearance on Tuesday. The scofflaws are the entities that don't provide the statutorily required contract information on who funded the work that led to the patent. Raytheon provided its standard we're working for DOD and the IC government interest statement:
“This invention was made with Government support. The Government has certain rights in the invention.”
We dig through a lot of these statements every week. Here we bring you a little Bayh-Dole government interest statement mumbo-jumbo from IBM.
“The United States Government has rights in this invention made in the performance of work under a US Government Contract between the United States of America and IBM Division holding the contract GBS Government Agency issuing the Prime Contract: Defense agencies.”
IBM received the most US patents ever. They know how what needs to be in a government interest statement. When you find a statement like this, it's a dead giveaway that the entity — college, company, institute — is working for the Intelligence Community or on a classified DOD program. This statement appears on an IBM patent that presents inventions that are part of the document classification and extraction needed for both Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) and for figuring out what is in a vast store of documents obtained by an adversary. Think all those hard drives and thumb drives recovered at Osama Bin Ladin's Islamabad “estate”.
Patents By The Numbers
The Patent Office granted 6,760 new patents on Tuesday, November 30, 2021. One hundred twenty-eight (128) benefitted from taxpayer funding. Here are the numbers.
One hundred twenty (120) patents have Government Interest Statements.
Thirty-three (33) have an applicant or an assignee that is a government agency.
The 128 new patents have 147 department-level funding citations.
These patents are the work of 440 inventors.
The 412 American inventors come from 35 states.
The Big Three States:
California has 34 first-named inventors and 108 total inventors.
Massachusetts has 14 first-named inventors and 49 total inventors.
New York has eight (8) first-named inventors and 27 total inventors.
Twenty-eight (28) foreign inventors come from ten (10) countries.
There are 70 patents (55%) where at least one assignee is a college or university, the HERD.
Federally Funded Research and Development Centers (FFRDCs) received nine (9) patents.
A federal department is an assignee on 24 patents.
Patent Count By Department
The table below shows funding citations by department.
Patents By Technology Center
This week there are 127 utility patents and one design patent. Here is where the utility patents were examined:
It’s Back
The Navy’s Design Patent for its “MARINE VEHICLE WITH SHROUD AND CONTINUOUS LENS” made another appearance on Tuesday. What is this thing? Part of the Navy’s Internet of Ocean Things?
The Health Complex
The table below shows the funding citations for patents where the assignee cites the Health Complex, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the institutes at the National Institutes of Health, and other subagencies that are part of HHS, as the funding agency.
The Thanksgiving Patent Applications
On Thanksgiving, there was no FedInvent newsletter, but we created the FedInvent Report with Thursday's applications for our readers. On Thursday, November 25, 2021, Thanksgiving Day, the Patent Office published 7,819 pre-grant patent applications. One hundred fifty-six (156) benefitted from taxpayer funding. You can access the FedInvent Patent Application for November 25, 2021, here.
Before We Go
As usual, there are many more taxpayer-funded patents than we can cover here. Please explore the FedInvent Patent Report. It's an important addition to your newsletter subscription.
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We'll see you later week with the latest on the federal innovation ecosphere. As always, thank you for reading FedInvent and supporting our work.
The FedInvent Team
FedInvent tells the stories of inventors, investigators, and innovators. Wayfinder Digital's FedInvent Project follows the federal innovation ecosphere, taxpayer money, and the inventions it pays for.
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