may please the court my name is ron cahill and i represent the opponents and patent applicants in this case dr demeter baron off at all dr barron office invention is not directed to an abstract idea under stuff one of alice because it provides an data about the patient and then goes through an estimation routine to tell us things about the patient the sensors could never tell us in essence the medical device right and the f d a regulates this is medical device can now measure parameters measure finger quotes parameters that it could never measure before i don't like to talk about what some of those are if we reached out to dr barron i was invention is patentable because it's one way to understand claim one is that it relates to information at three different levels the most basic level is data and that data is acquired from physiological sensors now that data is not the internal state variables and claim that's the next higher level of information rather it's data associated with those rebels and that is that was covered by the and the measure yes that's exactly what so an example of data that's measured might be the output of a heart rate monitor it gives you a signal that's representative of the heart rate it's a noisy signal it's not perfect it's not exact but it's the data in the system can use that now the next level up is the internal state variables now the internal state variables are not the same thing as the data they are not even if even if they are there yes we are there if they are they are estimated parameters and so even  internal state variable is partly it may not be the same as what you measure because as your honor noticed in the math that gets do here each internal state variable its estimate is based on all of the measurements and on predictions from all of the other state variables so when you see em is a function of t said k there the specification explains that that's all of the measurements it's not just one and so the state variables are based on all of them to has he said the s is a particular state variable right it's integrated across heart health or something with a probability of that now you is given all of the measurements on everything on at time t said k correct ok and then you're multiplying and what exactly is coming what's come before is more data or measurements and prior estimations and one of the estimation prior estimations based on well this is a recursive filter so there's an initial estimation and then at each time stuff there is more data and more asked of us so we predict what the heart rate will be tomorrow and then tomorrow we check all the data and compare it to all of our predictions for the state variables and based on that there are post area or probability density functions that are built that tell you that estimate for you what the internal state variable is now and where  gets truly important is internal state variables don't have to be the things that you measure so in fact expressly in the claim they're not if you look to the specification one of the key problems out that a key parameter for this system is delivered oxygen and you can see this example in the appendix of pages fifty nine to sixty three it's something that you can't measure it's something that your heart rate monitor and other physiological sensors can't tell you but claim one can because when it's a it's an internal state variable that can be based on the data that you do measure and on other state variables and so now your medical device it can measure a finger quotes again parameters that it couldn't measure and that's a key part of what this invention is it's the problem that the inventor set out to solve when they set out to come up with a system that delivered objective diagnoses and those are also the steps that the examiner found were not conventional or well known in the industry so this invention has an important technical effect which we think takes it out of step one by the very thing that gives it that technical effect those are steps that are not conventional right because it's the examiner said it was the recited elements that were not conventional and so these unconventional elements get you to this place through the first three elements of claim one where the examiner mean in the examiners answer when the examiner is that the only the time tension that may be considered a solicitor's brief as receiving data processing the received data in calculating using the formula a new set of data and subsequently identifying particular data are well understood routine in conventional activities and we wouldn't disagree that once somebody has conceived and laid out all of these steps that implementing on a general purpose computer can be done a person of ordinary skill in the ark can do that but in fact putting these steps together so that your medical can can measure and keep using my finger quotes things that it can't measure that seems to be neither abstract nor is it conventional or routine so here we talk about cases like in your remaining time electric power a algorithms rules sure and then outputting some kind of indication of something the health status of an electric power or something to do with investments and  what's going on here that differentiates what's going on here from those claims which were at bottom about robbing peter analyzing data and then putting a new type of data based  analysis collect if you will in electric power the claims did in fact call for collecting analyzing of splaying data in the context of power grid monitoring those claim elements however said to be purely conventional that the things that were measured were known measurements that the analysis that was done was known analysis and that the output was exactly the output the you'd expect in the invention was simply taking what people are ready did what was already well known in conventional in the industry and said yes and he was not that putting it on a computer that's safe he had a little twist to it and there was a twist and it in s a p we have selected a sample space generating a distribution function in a certain way and that's where the twist is in generating a plot of the distribution function but again essentially these are all well known stops in the art of financial analysis and what changed was the particular just reducing function that the inventors had recognize that the gaussian distribution that had traditionally been used was maybe not accurate and they came up with a very simple to distribution essentially swapped out one distribution for another and that was that as i understand it and drawn or perhaps knows much allegations from which one could plausibly infer that those steps were invented if that's what the court said here it's a different i mean this part i think i do remember it wasn't because there was no there were no facts in which one could conclude that it wasn't innovative brilliant clever and useful but just not the right side of the line where that  says to take place well isn't that the question of whether it's an abstract idea are not as opposed to well another way step what you did is that all of the innovative inference was in the abstract category and why is this not that because this is a concrete stories of steps that are sequenced in time polling data from physiological sensors please the court took stewart prep holly director of the u s p t o what i think i heard this morning were as there was a slight shift in argument on behalf of baron off i think what the real focus of the argument was in to this court was whether the claims describe an improvement to compete or didn't really talk a lot about medical devices or other technological improvements and i think based on the case law that's been decided by this court this type of discussion is really not something that's improving the computer if you look at the specification and this kind of falls under the the government's inquiry as to whether the claims are adding significantly more of the this specification talks about the use of conventional hardware and that's conventional hardware in terms of the sensors which are described and pursue medical devices very many of them will have extremely sophisticated processing let's just call those computers and the part of the medical device that's being improved is the computer it's still a medical device and you're getting health information that you wouldn't get why is that not illusory well following you know the two step framework first we look to see whether there's that abstract idea and here i think the examiner found in the board properly affirmed that what's being discussed may be very novel the algorithm may be novel it may not have been used before it may not have been used before in the health care industry but you know that's very similar to other cases including cases before the supreme court like parker be fluke so we can't look to the novelty of the formula two of the the section one zero one inquiry and when we look to step two and we say you know is there something more happening here or is it just you know take this idea and put it on a computer that's where we have you know our conventional medical quitman we have our conventional computer hardware which is recited as just processor memory network interface accept and you know what's really happening here because these claims have been rejected as obvious before the algorithm was added is the novelty of the algorithm and unfortunately i think our hands are just that the supreme court  this court has said over and over again that novel algorithms do not take claims outside of the scope of does not make claims eligible so i hear their argument and it may be that this algorithm is doing something very special but the case law that we have in front of us doesn't allow that to to make those claims not eligible what if hypothetically someone invented a medical device that measures heart rate but outputs on a display on this medical device the likelihood of some kind of arithmetic device you know and there's a lot of processing power going on inside this device using series of mathematical operations to specific problem then you know likelihood that someone's going to have a heart attack you're measuring a specific kind of data in a specific way you know someone's heart rate or the oxygen in their blood the more specificity added to the claims increases the likelihood that they're going to be found eligible and that's one of the major problems that we have with these claims is their breat happens that while the new guidelines start with three broad categories of abstract ideas least of those categories were discussed in the examiner's office actions and answered in the board's decision which are  mathematics and methods of organizing activities so we think the framework applied might have been slightly different we would have started with broader categories and then we would have moved on from there but the outcome would have been the same  well to answer judge chance question the guidelines take abstract ideas and put them into three broad categories and the methods of organizing activities here would be you know collecting information processing information what doctors do with that information it would also probably be in some ways a mental process as well so those electric power  on because we felt like that was you know the clearest guidance from the supreme court on you know the use of mathematical algorithms and trying to make predictions but we definitely agree that you know to the extent that electric power and safety talk about gathering data processing data you know making predictions based on that data is certainly analogous to this case and what support offices decision become one of the ways we have identified something is abstract but i think that i think we would agree that the more abstract something becomes the more obstructive of the word abstract as a number of different meanings of generality happens to be one if i could would like to mention the duck to go back to the cases a little bit you know we talked a little bit about electric power critically the court said there that there were one of the ways that the court distinguished the claims there as being not subject matter eligible as the court so that there were no new techniques for analyzing the data but there were no new algorithms climes i think that's important and that had that was not conventional and well known then yes it would it would then pass a stop to it when i think about the  so math innovative math can be the basis for believing it can certainly help right there we're talking about a method and we have steps in our method and if those steps go beyond the abstract idea we're in step two and those steps are not well known or conventional or routine then yes and i think to get there you have to look at what the abstract ideas and here write the abstract idea from the board was predicting patient health risks and diagnoses and a broader level to a mathematical formula or relationship i think claim one goes well beyond that and addresses this problem parameters which is a stepping stone to be able to objectively diagnose a patient i think that goes beyond the abstract idea that's been stated and the steps themselves are