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 .
DETAIL ACTION
Notice to Applicant(s)
This application has been examined. Claims 1-15 are pending.
The prior art submitted on July 23, 2024 has been considered.
Receipt is acknowledged of papers submitted under 35 U.S.C. § 119, which have been placed of record in the file.
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) A patent for a claimed invention may not be obtained, nowwitstanding that the claimed invention is not identically disclosed as set forth in section 102 of this title, if the differences between the subject matter sought to be patented and the prior art are such that the subject matter as a whole would have been obvious at the time the invention was made to a person having ordinary skill in the art to which said subject matter pertains. Patentability shall not be negatived by the manner in which the invention was made.
Claims 1 and 14 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Maniac et al. (GB 2573738) in view of Wright (US 2013/0302758).
As per claim 1, Maniac et al. disclose a system to efficiently determine a driving behaviour of a driver driving a vehicle, which includes a 3-axis accelerometer placed inside the vehicle, the 3-axis accelerometer is adapted to generate an accelerometer data related to an acceleration of the vehicle at each time instant (see at least figures 2, 11; page 3, lines 1-5, 34-36); a direction sensor placed inside the vehicle, and adapted to generate a direction data related to a direction in which the 3-axis accelerometer is travelling; an orientation sensor placed inside the vehicle, and adapted to generate an orientation data related to an orientation and an angular velocity of the 3-axis accelerometer (see at least figure 11; page 18, lines 1-14); and a processing unit adapted to process the accelerometer data, the direction data and the orientation data, and determining the driving behavior of the driver of the vehicle (see at least figures 1-3, 11; page 8, lines 17-21, page 35, line 36 to page 15, line 23; page 18, lines 1-14).
Maniac et al. do not explicitly disclose that the accelerometer data is re-calibrated to generate a calibrated accelerometer data where the 3 axes of accelerometer are aligned with the direction of the vehicle. However, such feature is suggested in at least
Figure 3, paragraphs 0030 and 0034 of the Wright reference. It would have been obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art before the effective filling date of the invention to incorporate the teaching of Wright into the system of Maniac et al. with a reasonable expectation of success in order to provide the system with the enhanced capacity of ensuring that the acceleration along the axis aligned with the general forward movement of the vehicle.
As per claim 14, wherein the vehicles are adapted to rotate laterally, and wherein the processing unit is adapted to compare the corrected accelerometer data in a three-dimensional frame of the vehicle at each time instance with a predefined threshold, and if the magnitude of the corrected accelerometer data is above the predefined threshold, the processing unit is adapted to determine such time instance as an inappropriate driving behaviour instance (see at least the abstract; figure 10; page 15, lines 10-15; page 44, lines 5-14; claim 12).
Claims 2-13 and 15 are objected to as being dependent upon a rejected base claim, but would be allowable if rewritten in independent form including all of the limitations of the base claim and any intervening claims.
Conclusion
Claims 1 and 14 are rejected. Claims 2-13 and 15 are objected.
The following references are cited as being of general interest: Chowdhary et al. (2004/0236474), Van den Bergh (2013/0166099), Krishna et al. (2022/0041169) and Kim et al. (2023/0264711).
Any inquiry concerning this communication or earlier communications from the examiner should be directed to TAN QUANG NGUYEN whose telephone number is (571) 272-6966. The examiner can normally be reached on Monday to Thursday from 7:00am to 5:30pm.
If attempts to reach the examiner by telephone are unsuccessful, the examiner’s supervisor, Peter Nolan, can be reached at 570-270-7016.
Information regarding the status of an application may be obtained from the Patent Application Information Retrieval (PAIR) system. Status information for published applications may be obtained from either Private PAIR or Public PAIR. Status information for unpublished applications is available through Private PAIR only. For more information about the PAIR system, see http://portal.uspto.gov/external/portal. Should you have questions about access to the Private PAIR system, contact the Electronic Business Center (EBC) at 866-217-9197 (toll-free).
Examiner interviews are available via telephone, in-person, and video conferencing using a USPTO supplied web-based collaboration tool. To schedule an interview, applicant is encouraged to use the USPTO Automated Interview Request (AIR) at http://www.uspto.gov/interviewpractice.
January 14, 2026
/TAN Q NGUYEN/Primary Examiner, Art Unit 3661
Prosecution Insights