PTAB

IPR2015-01679

InfoBionic Inc v. CardioNet

Key Events

Petition

petition Intelligence

Title: Apparatus and Method for Remotely Monitoring and Assessing Patient Status
Brief Description: The ’901 patent discloses a system for remotely monitoring a patient's health. The system comprises a portable monitoring unit worn by the patient and a central monitoring device that communicate wirelessly. The portable unit includes sensors, a programmable microprocessor with active and inactive power-saving states, and a transceiver for communication.

Prior Art Relied Upon: Sellers (Patent 5,678,562).
Core Argument for this Ground:
- Prior Art Mapping: Petitioner argued that Sellers, which discloses a portable physiological monitor for collecting ECG data and communicating with a remote computer system, teaches every limitation of the challenged claims. Sellers’s portable monitor 10 serves as the claimed portable unit, and its remote computer system 110 is the central monitoring device. The monitor includes automatic sensors (electrodes), a power supply, and a transceiver (modem 28). Petitioner contended that Sellers’s command processor 66 is a remotely programmable microprocessor that is responsive to activating parameters, such as a preselected ECG state (call/alarm limit) or a request from the remote computer. Furthermore, Sellers’s processor 66 has a "powered down" state to conserve battery power, which Petitioner equated with the claimed "inactive state," and a fully powered state for analysis, which corresponds to the "active state."

Prior Art Relied Upon: Sellers (Patent 5,678,562) and Stutman (Patent 5,416,695).
Core Argument for this Ground:
- Prior Art Mapping: Petitioner asserted that while Sellers teaches the core monitoring system, Stutman provides the additional features recited in these claims. Stutman discloses a medical alert system with a portable telemetry device that includes a location-determining device (e.g., GPS) to find a patient in an emergency. Stutman also teaches a system architecture with multiple portable subscriber units (additional portable central monitoring devices) that allow remote medical personnel to receive alerts and patient data from a central host computer.
- Motivation to Combine: A POSITA would combine Stutman’s location-determining device with Sellers’s monitor for the obvious benefit of enabling emergency services to locate a patient when an abnormal cardiac event is detected. Likewise, a POSITA would integrate Stutman’s portable subscriber units into the Sellers system to allow specialists to review critical patient data remotely, improving the timeliness of care and cost-effectiveness, as both references emphasize.
- Expectation of Success: Petitioner argued that incorporating a known location-tracking module or a portable data receiver into a remote health monitoring system represented a simple and predictable combination of known elements to improve the system's overall utility.

Prior Art Relied Upon: Sellers (Patent 5,678,562), Stutman (Patent 5,416,695), and Lamensdorf (Patent 5,568,121).
Core Argument for this Ground:
- Prior Art Mapping: This ground adds Lamensdorf to teach the limitations of claims 18 and 19 related to requiring and evaluating a patient response. Lamensdorf discloses a remote monitoring system where a portable attendant periodically queries the user for a status update. If the user fails to respond or provides an "unsatisfactory response" within a preset time, the system transmits an alarm to a central monitoring center.
- Motivation to Combine: A POSITA would be motivated to add Lamensdorf’s query-and-response functionality to the combined Sellers/Stutman system to improve monitoring efficiency and reduce costs. This feature would allow the central station to confirm that a patient is actually in distress before alerting medical personnel, thereby reducing false alarms. This motivation aligns with the cost-effectiveness goals discussed in Stutman.
- Expectation of Success: Integrating a confirmation step via a patient query was a known technique for improving the reliability of remote alert systems. A POSITA would have reasonably expected that adding this feature would successfully reduce false alarms and yield predictable results.

"Inactive state" (Claims 4, 13, 16, 20): Petitioner proposed this term be construed as "an operating state of the microprocessor in which power management is applied to reduce power consumption relative to the active state." This construction was central to mapping the power-saving or "powered down" modes described in the prior art (e.g., Sellers's command processor 66) to the claim limitations.
"Programmable" (Claims 1, 4, 10, 13, 16, 17, 18): Petitioner argued this should mean "a microprocessor in which instructions that are executed by the microprocessor, or variables for use in instructions, can be inserted into a memory associated with the microprocessor." This construction supported the argument that prior art systems allowing for remote updates of analysis algorithms met the "remotely programmable" limitation.
"Activating parameters for an activation condition" (Claims 1, 4, 10, 13, 16): Petitioner proposed this phrase means "a value or a signal caused by a condition that causes the microprocessor to take an action." This broad interpretation was used to argue that various triggers in the prior art, such as a sensor value crossing a threshold or a command from an external source, satisfied this claim element.

Petitioner requests the institution of an inter partes review and cancellation of claims 1-22 of Patent 6,225,901 as unpatentable.