Using Ambercite to double-check your patent search results

Patent searching is an imperfect art.

Searchers, examiners and patent attorneys can spend many hours preparing complex queries and searching patents, and then hope that at the end of the process they have the best possible result set. But how can they be sure that they have found all of the relevant patents?

To be honest, no one can be sure of this - there are over 100 million patents out there, published in a long list of languages, and it is practically impossible to review all of them in a patent search. But there is a simple and cost-effective double check to confirm your current search results.

And this the role of Ambercite and its unique AI based double checking.

Take, for example, the recently published patent WO2020074814A1, filed by the French company Izome, with the title of Shoe, referred to as a connected shoe, capable of communicating with the outside. This claims a shoe with built in sensors in different parts of the sole, where these sensors communicate wirelessly with each other, rather than through a breakable wire link.

This patent has a priority date of October 2018, and eight listed backward citations. But was this prior art search complete? More to the point, what could a simple and fast Ambercite double-check add to the list of results?

This search is very easy to set up, as shown below:

And will return 50 results, as requested.

Of note, the results will comprise a mixure of ‘known’ and ‘unknown’ citations:

‘Known’ citations in this context those already known - ‘unknown’ citations have not yet been listed as citations, but our algorithms suggest might be relevant prior art.

Since we are double-checking the patent search, we are only really interested in finding new citations, so we might limit the results to unknown citations:

For the remaining patents, we will make them easier to review by highlighting some key terms:

The remaining list of results looks something like this (This is a part extract of the full set of results - click on this image for a full interactive version).

We can scroll up and down the list, but another way of reviewing the results is to click on any image or title block - this brings up the “Patent review panel” - which is shown for the Nike patent at the bottom of the above image:

This refers to a shoe with a sensor system. But is there a wireless communication between these sensors?

This is not clear from the summary, but we can use the provided Google patent link to open up the full specification of the patent, complete with keyword highlighting. And in paragraph 35 we see that:

In other words, wireless communication between the sensors (216 in the above image), in a 2012 patent not cited in the patent search. This is clearly a relevant prior art, that has not been cited against the PCT patent.

Advanced Ambercite - the hide box

Worried about finding patents in Ambercite you have already reviewed?

Not a problem - you can avoid this by adding the patents you have already reviewed into the hide box, shown below:

Any patents added to this box will not be shown in the results - and neither will their direct family members. This way, the only results you will be reviewing are entirely new results.

This can help save you time in the patent review process.

Implications

This blog is not intended to be critical of the original patent search - I have done more than enough patent searching to know just how hard it is. However, it is intended to show:

• How quick and simple a double-check to your patent search result can be

• How this quick and simple double check can find relevant prior art missed by the original search strategy.

Now, I should note that this Ambercite double-check does not always find an improvement on the known prior art. And that is fine - such a result can help confirm the original search strategy. So there is no real downside from the double-check - either you improve on your search results, or you confirm them. Either way, you are better off.

Do you want to double-check your own search results?

Ambercite offers free trials, but to get the most of this, please contact us for a demonstration. You can try either option via the links below.