This decision relates to an opposition against European patent No. 1 630 633. The opposition division found that the patent in an amended form met the requirements of the EPC. Both the opponent and the proprietor filed an appeal. Here are practical takeaways from the decision T 2546/18 () of 21.12.2022 of Technical Board of Appeal 3.2.06:
Key takeaways
The mere output of the device health assessment cannot be considered to represent or achieve a technical effect, in particular as such output may also lead to a recommendation which may or may not be taken into account by a technician.
Mental acts and mathematical methods as such are not considered to be of a technical nature.
The invention
The invention relates to an apparatus and a method for monitoring the health of devices such as gas turbine engines.
Figure 1 of EP1630633
Here is how the invention was defined in claim 1:
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Claim 1 (sole request)
Is it patentable?
The Board did not agree with the findings of the opposition division and revoked the patent based on the following reasons:
1. The subject-matter of claim 1 does not involve an inventive step (Article 56 EPC) for the following reasons.
2. The method defined in claim 1 comprises a mixture of steps of a technical nature (such as “receiving a plurality of sensory outputs”) and steps of data analysis which are merely based on mathematical methods and are therefore considered of non-technical nature (such as the features relating to data stream analysis). The Board therefore applies the COMVIK-approach (T 641/00, OJ EPO 2003, 352), also referred to in G 1/19 (OJ EPO 2021, A77).
3. It is common ground between the parties that the method for assessing health of a device disclosed in D2 can be considered to represent the closest prior art to the subject-matter of claim 1.
4. The appellant acknowledged that the method of D2 resulted in the extraction and outputting of only a single device health feature, which device health feature can be identified with the “condition signature” according to D2, rather than of “a plurality of device health features“. This distinguishing feature is referenced as feature (i) in the following.
5. The parties disagreed on the question of whether the final feature defined in claim 1, referred to in the following also as feature (ii), was disclosed in D2. This feature defines more precisely the step of receiving said plurality of sensory outputs to comprise three additional steps of
commencing to receive said plurality of sensory outputs at a beginning of a window duration;
sampling said plurality of sensory outputs to produce a sampled data stream; and
outputting said synchronized data stream comprising said sampled data stream at an end of said window duration.
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6. As was already stated in the Board’s preliminary opinion, the distinguishing features do not contribute to a (single or several) technical effect(s) necessarily achieved over the whole scope of the claim (see also G 1/19 and T 641/00, ibid.).
6.1 The claimed method certainly involves technical considerations, for example in receiving sensory output or in deriving from the sensory data a plurality of device health features, by establishing a link between measured or captured properties and technical condition of the device.
6.2 The purpose of the method according to claim 1 is the output of a device health assessment, or as it is formulated at the end of paragraph 17 of the patent in suit, “[t]he output of this process is an engine health assessment or a series of assessments with varying degrees of probability (or levels of belief)”. The claim does not exclude that the output might be just a simple numerical value, e.g. “3”, which might be looked up in a table by a technician to correspond to a particular condition of the device, e.g. “oil leakage detected” or “bird stroke impact” or even “all components in normal condition”. Paragraph 20 and granted claim 3 specify that health assessment may lead to produce a recommended maintenance action.
6.3 It is not apparent from the patent, and it has also not been argued by the respondent, that the extracted and output health assessment is necessarily used to control the operation of the device undergoing health assessment. The mere output of the device health assessment cannot be considered to represent or achieve a technical effect, in particular as such output may also lead to a recommendation which may or may not be taken into account by a technician.
6.4 Both distinguishing features (i) and (ii) pertain only to the treatment of the previously obtained/sampled data, so as to derive further data characterising the state of the device (“health features” or a “health assessment”).
6.4.1 Feature (i) just results in more device conditions being available to be taken into account in the health assessment. Although potentially based on technical considerations, the extraction of a plurality of device health features is essentially based on mental acts (establishing mathematical models linking sensory data to a physical condition, see also granted claim 8) and/or mathematical methods (use of neural networks etc., see granted claim 9), which may then lead to a corresponding implementation on a normal computer (see also paragraphs 16, 19 and 20 of the patent). Mental acts and mathematical methods as such are not considered to be of a technical nature. Although features based on such aspects might in principle still contribute to a technical effect, this is not the case here, since the claimed method does not achieve a technical effect (see point 6.3 above). The mere implementation on multi-purpose computer(s) does not achieve anything going beyond the normal operation of such computer(s).
6.4.2 Similarly, the operations performed on the sensory output data according to feature (ii) – i.e. data synchronisation by sampling in a (pre-defined) window duration and extraction and output of a plurality of health features – also do not provide a technical effect which goes beyond the normal operation of the computer(s) employed for the execution of the claimed method. They also only rely on the insight that a certain momentary physical condition of the device is characterised by taking into account different measurements at that very moment and consequently that data of different sensory streams need to be synchronised, which is then implemented accordingly on a multi-purpose computer (paragraph 14 of the patent in suit). These considerations clearly imply also technical knowledge. The same is however also the case in D2, and the difference – assuming that there is indeed a different synchronisation method defined in feature (ii) of claim 1 compared to that implemented according to pages 15/16 in D2 – could only be seen in that particular way defined by feature (ii) of synchronising or aligning data. However it is not apparent in the present case that this involves any further technical consideration which would necessarily achieve a technical effect going beyond the normal operation of the computer(s) on which the operations are performed.
6.4.3 Moreover, and as also argued by the appellant, it is also not apparent from the patent that these distinguishing method steps would provide for any technical effect compared to the method known of D2.
6.5 In the absence of any technical effect achieved by features (i) and (ii), the features cannot be considered to contribute to the solution of a technical problem. The subject-matter of claim 1 therefore cannot be considered to involve an inventive step (Article 56 EPC).
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More information
You can read the whole decision here: decision T 2546/18 () of 21.12.2022 of Technical Board of Appeal 3.2.06.