0000000000326640
AUTHOR
Mark Atherton
A Novel Visual Interface to Foster Innovation in Mechanical Engineering and Protect from Patent Infringement
One of the main time and money consuming tasks in the design of industrial devices and parts is the checking of possible patent infringements. Indeed, the great number of documents to be mined and the wide variety of technical language used to describe inventions are reasons why considerable amounts of time may be needed. On the other hand, the early detection of a possible patent conflict, in addition to reducing the risk of legal disputes, could stimulate a designers' creativity to overcome similarities in overlapping patents. For this reason, there are a lot of existing patent analysis systems, each with its own features and access modes. We have designed a visual interface providing an …
Design for invention: a framework for identifying emerging design–prior art conflict
The increasing complexity of patented mechanical designs means that their novelty and inventive steps increasingly rely on interacting geometric features and how they contribute to device functions. These features and interactions are normally incorporated in patents through clear patent claims. However, patents can be difficult to interpret and understand for designers due to their legal terminologies. This suggests there is a need for greater awareness of relevant prior art amongst designers in terms of avoiding potential conflict. This paper presents a framework that helps designers obtain insight on relevant prior art and enables emerging design–prior art comparison. The framework mainl…
Evaluation of a Visual Tool for Early Patent Infringement Detection During Design
Patent infringement detection usually implies research among documents in different forms, in both natural and unstructured language, often involving a lot of human resources and time. In order to ease this patent check process, we previously presented a visual tool to be used by designers themselves at any stage of the design process, providing them with useful and reliable information for deciding whether to steer their design away from potential patent infringements. In this work, we report on a usability study carried out on such a tool with 21 professional designers from industry in the field of mechanical engineering. The outcome of our study shows that our tool is very well accepted …