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Test your patent-searching skills!
The esp@cenet quiz is an exercise proposed monthly to our readers. Its aim is to show that patent searching can be an exciting quest, yielding relevant results in almost all technical fields.
New Quiz:The conveyor belt restaurant
This month we challenge our readers to search for patents relating to a kind of restaurant that has been introduced in Japan. At conveyor-belt restaurants, customers seated around a counter select small plates of different types of dishes that go by on a conveyor belt. The plates are different colours, with each colour being associated with a different price. Requiring fewer service personnel than regular restaurants, conveyor-belt eateries are cheaper to run.
Try to find patents relating to this type of restaurant.
The last month quiz
You are often disturbed by the use of mobile phones in public areas: cinema, hospitals, etc. To resolve this problem, one can imagine systems blocking mobile telephone communications in a given area or room. Try to retrieve patents relating to those systems.
Solution to the last month quiz
Step one: define the concepts best covering this invention: common technical features that may be found in patents relating to the subject.
- mobile phone, cellular phone
- noise, disturb*, silence
- hospital, cinema, public
- prevent, screen*
Step two: combine the concepts
Several combinations yield no relevant results. The combination "cellular telephone disturb*" yields, however, one relevant document that corresponds to our subject.
US2001006886 Communication inhibiting device and communication inhibiting system
Step three: use the classification symbol to continue the search
This US document is classified under H04K3/00 that covers systems to jam communications.
This classification symbol combined with the keywords "telephone or phone" yields a small number of additional documents, among them:
WO0207120, A SYSTEM TO DENY CELLULAR SERVICE AT REFUELING STATIONS
EP1061686, CALL MASKING SYSTEM FOR MOBILE TELEPHONE
WO9818232, CELLULAR TELEPHONE JAMMING METHOD AND DEVICE
This search can be continued to obtain a broader collection of patents by using other words to cover the concept of a telephone. H04K3/00 combined with "mobile or cellular" yields an interesting list of additional relevant patents.
This list of patents can be extended further by using additional keywords such as inhibit* and mask*. We cannot claim that our search is exhaustive, but it does give a good overview of existing patents and technologies used to inhibit cellular phone calls.
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