Notice of Pre-AIA or AIA Status
The present application, filed on or after March 16, 2013, is being examined under the first inventor to file provisions of the AIA .
Continued Examination Under 37 CFR 1.114
A request for continued examination under 37 CFR 1.114, including the fee set forth in 37 CFR 1.17(e), was filed in this application after final rejection. Since this application is eligible for continued examination under 37 CFR 1.114, and the fee set forth in 37 CFR 1.17(e) has been timely paid, the finality of the previous Office action has been withdrawn pursuant to 37 CFR 1.114. Applicant's submission filed on 3/16/2026 has been entered.
Response to Arguments
Applicant’s arguments with respect to claims 1-19, 21 have been considered but are moot in view of new grounds of rejection.
Claim Rejections - 35 USC § 103
The following is a quotation of 35 U.S.C. 103 which forms the basis for all obviousness rejections set forth in this Office action:
A patent for a claimed invention may not be obtained, notwithstanding that the claimed invention is not identically disclosed as set forth in section 102, if the differences between the claimed invention and the prior art are such that the claimed invention as a whole would have been obvious before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to a person having ordinary skill in the art to which the claimed invention pertains. Patentability shall not be negated by the manner in which the invention was made.
The factual inquiries for establishing a background for determining obviousness under 35 U.S.C. 103 are summarized as follows:
1. Determining the scope and contents of the prior art.
2. Ascertaining the differences between the prior art and the claims at issue.
3. Resolving the level of ordinary skill in the pertinent art.
4. Considering objective evidence present in the application indicating obviousness or nonobviousness.
This application currently names joint inventors. In considering patentability of the claims the examiner presumes that the subject matter of the various claims was commonly owned as of the effective filing date of the claimed invention(s) absent any evidence to the contrary. Applicant is advised of the obligation under 37 CFR 1.56 to point out the inventor and effective filing dates of each claim that was not commonly owned as of the effective filing date of the later invention in order for the examiner to consider the applicability of 35 U.S.C. 102(b)(2)(C) for any potential 35 U.S.C. 102(a)(2) prior art against the later invention.
Claims 1-3, 7, 16-17, 21 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over US20200221956A1 (Tzvieli) in view of US20130088600A1 (Wu) and US20160089086A1 (Lin).
Regarding claim 1, Tzvieli discloses the following as claimed:
An electronic device (Figs. 1a-1c, “smartglasses”), comprising: an interface to receive a video of a human face, the video having a plurality of frames (pars. 0089-94); a memory storing executable code; and a processor coupled to the interface and to the memory, wherein, as a result of executing the executable code (pars. 0372-0373; various types of memories as well as a “computer program” are disclosed; see also Fig. 1a; “interface” depicts “arrows” to the computer; see also par 0105), the processor is to: receive the video from the interface (“Images” 821 to computer 828); (par. 0094), but is not relied upon to teach the (strike-through 1) limitation above.
Wu teaches a video analysis and tracking module that does video reduction i.e., “subsampling” that could be based on facial features (pars. 0016-0017, 0024, 0038, 0047; see also Figs. 1, 4-5; in par. 0047, “M” meets the “n” as claimed).
At the time of effective filing, it would have been obvious to incorporate the teaching of of Wu into Tzvieli in order to achieve real-time video processing (Wu, pars. 0017-0018). The combined teachings of Tzvieli and Wu as a whole are not relied upon to teach the (strike-through 2) limitation above.
Lin teaches the PPG signal has a sampling frequency of double the frame rate (Lin, pars. 0046-47; which teaches a sampling frequency of 8 Hz based on a 4 Hz frame rate that satisfies the Nyquist theorem. Moreover, sampling frequency is not limited thereto and is determined according to the operating capability of the processing unit).
At the time of effective filing, it would have been obvious to incorporate the teaching of Lin in view of Tzvieli and Wu in order to accurately obtain a correct PPG signal in non-static state prevalent in portable/wearable electronic device (Lin, par. 0007).
Regarding claim 2, The electronic device of claim 1, wherein the interface is a network interface (Tzvieli, pars. 0105, 0184, 0370, “cloud-based”, “client-server”, “network device”).
Regarding claim 3, The electronic device of claim 1, wherein the interface is a peripheral interface for one of a camera and a removable storage device (Tzvieli, pars. 0370, 0372, “smartglasses”, “handheld device”, “smartphone”, “flash memory”).
Regarding claim 7, The electronic device of claim 1, wherein the video includes movement of the human face (Tzvieli, Figs. 6-10 depict movement of the human face to may reveal possible onset of a stroke).
Regarding claim 16, The electronic device of claim 1, wherein the video is a live stream that is provided to the processor via the interface (Tzvieli, Figs. 6-10 depict a live event of detection of a stroke onset).
Regarding claim 17, The electronic device of claim 1, wherein the use of the neural network to predict the PPG signal includes downsampling the sequence of images in at least one of an image size or an image number, to produce a downsampled sequence of images (Tzvieli, Figs. 6-10 teaches “ROIs” that meets one of image size; Wu teaches the aspect of one of image number via rejection analysis of claim 1 above. Thus, the rejection of claim 1 is incorporated herein. Note: image number is read by “M” in Wu).
Regarding claim 18, the rejection of claim 1 is incorporated herein. The combination of Tzvieli and Wu does not teach the following limitation as further recited. Lin teaches the electronic device of claim 1, wherein the sampling frequency of the PPG signal is double the frame rate of the sequence of images (Lin, pars. 0046-47; teach a sampling frequency of 8 Hz based on a 4 Hz frame rate that satisfies the Nyquist theorem. Moreover, sampling frequency is not limited thereto and is determined according to the operating capability of the processing unit), and wherein n is determined on a frame rate of the video (Wu teaches this aspect as analyzed in claim 1 above).
Regarding claim 21, The electronic device of claim 1, wherein input of the neural network includes a first number of images corresponding to the sequence of images, wherein output of the neural network includes a second number of one-dimensional data samples corresponding to the PPG signal, and wherein the second number is double the first number (Tzvieli, par. 0067-68; see also Lin as analyzed in claim 1 and 18).
Claims 4-5 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Tzvieli, Wu, and Lin as applied to claim 1 above and further in view of "Effects of frame rate and image resolution on pulse rate measured using multiple camera imaging photoplethysmography", hereinafter, “Blackford”.
Regarding claim 4, the rejection of claim 1 is incorporated herein. The combination of Tzvieli, Wu, and Lin as a whole does not teach claim 4, but Blackford does. The rejection of claim 4 based on the further teaching of Blackford as stated in the non-final Office Action of 5/23/2025 is incorporated herein with the same motivation as previously mentioned hereby incorporated.
Regarding claim 5, the rejection of claim 1 is incorporated herein. The combination of Tzvieli, Wu, and Lin as a whole does not teach claim 5 but Blackford does. The rejection of claim 5 based on the further teaching of Blackford as stated in the non-final Office Action of 5/23/2025 is incorporated herein.
Claim 6 is rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Tzvieli, Wu, Lin, and Blackford as applied to claim 5 above and further in view of US20190239761A1, hereinafter, “Tao”.
Regarding claim 6, the rejection of claim 5 is incorporated herein. The combination of Tzvieli, Wu, Lin, and Blackford as a whole does not teach claim 6 as further recited but Tao does. The rejection of claim 6 based on the further teaching of Tao as stated in the non-final Office Action of 5/23/2025 is incorporated herein with the same motivation as previously mentioned hereby incorporated.
Claims 8-10, 19 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Tzvieli, Wu, and Lin, and further in view of Tao.
Regarding claim 8, A non-transitory, computer-readable medium storing executable code, which, when executed by a processor, causes the processor to: obtain a video of a human face, the video having a plurality of frames; use a first neural network and every nth frame of the video to produce a sequence of images of the human face, wherein n is a positive integer larger than 1 (This portion of the claim overlaps with claim 1 and thus, is rejected for the same basis as set forth in claim 1. With respect to the “non-transitory, computer-readable medium storing executable code”, see Tzvieli (pars. 0372-0373; various types of memories as well as a “computer program” are disclosed).
The combination of Tzvieli, Wu, and Lin does not teach “produce a sequence of color converted images by converting a color space of the sequence of images from red-green-blue (RGB) to L*a*b; use a second neural network to predict a photoplethysmographic (PPG) signal based on the sequence of color converted images (This portion is rejected based on the further teaching of Tao as stated in the non-final Office Action of 5/23/2025 is incorporated herein with the same motivation as previously mentioned hereby incorporated), wherein the second neural network is to receive as input the sequence of color converted images corresponding to a frame rate and to generate as output the PPG signal having a sampling frequency higher than the frame rate (This portion is rejected base on Lin as analyzed in claims 1 and 18 above); and determine a heart rate based on the PPG signal (This portion is rejected based on Tzvieli as analyzed in claim 1 above).
Regarding claim 9, The computer-readable medium of claim 8, wherein the video is a real-time video. Tzvieli in the combination teaches this aspect as analyzed in the rejection of claim 16 above hereby incorporated.
Regarding claim 10, The computer-readable medium of claim 8, wherein the video of the human face has a minimum frame rate of 10 frames per second (Tzvieli, par. 0094, “30 fps” meets this limitation) and has a length of at least 10 seconds (Tzvieli, par. 0018, “ten minutes” meets this limitation; see also par. 0282).
Regarding claim 11, the rejection of claim 8 is incorporated herein. Lin in the combination further teaches the computer-readable medium of claim 8, wherein the executable code, when executed by the processor, causes the processor to convert the PPG signal to a frequency domain signal and to determine the heart rate based on a dominant frequency of the frequency domain signal (Lin, Fig. 1 and associated pars. 0030-39; Fig 3, S13-S15, “maximum spectrum peak value” meets a dominant frequency of the frequency domain signal).
Regarding claim 12, the rejection of claim 8 is incorporated herein. Lin in the combination further teaches The computer-readable medium of claim 8, wherein the PPG signal has a sampling frequency of at least 60 Hz (Lin, pars. 0046-47; which teaches a sampling frequency has to be larger than the Nyquist theorem. An example is a 20 Hz sampling frequency, but not limited thereto. Moreover, the sampling frequency is determined according to the operating capability of the processing unit. Thus, a sampling frequency of 60 Hz is within the capability of Lin).
Regarding claim 19, The computer-readable medium of claim 8, wherein the first neural network has been trained using a data set including human facial images in different lighting conditions (Tzvieli, par. 0159, “In a second example, the model is trained on samples generated from a first set of measurements taken during daytime, and is also trained on other samples generated from a second set of measurements taken during nighttime.”).
Claims 13-15 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Tzvieli and further in view of Wu, Lin, Blackford, and Tao.
Claims 13-15 recite limitations that encompass features combination of claims 1, 4, 5, 6, 11, 12. Therefore, the rejections of these claims are incorporated herein. Further, Tzvieli in pars. 0065-66 teaches “bandpass filtering” and by way of publicly known reference (Vii) “Roust et al” as an incorporation by reference discusses bandpass filtering feasible for heart rate (HR) between [0.7 Hz, 4 Hz] which reads on claim 14 limitation “filter out frequencies lower than 0.9 Hz and higher than 3 Hz” (See also Lin, pars. 0045-0048). Tzvieli in par. 0065 by way of Table 1 of Roust et al discusses heart rate estimation using FFT frequency analysis which reads on claim 13 limitation “applying a Fourier transform to the PPG signal to produce a frequency domain signal” (See also Lin, pars. 0045-0048).
Contact Information
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Vu Le can be reached at 2-7332. The fax phone number for the organization where this application or proceeding is assigned is 571-273-8300.
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/VU LE/Supervisory Patent Examiner, Art Unit 2668
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