Appeal No. 96-0935
Application 08/157,737
the operation of the cardiac monitor until the pain-mitigating
EMI pulse has terminated.
Looking now to the language of claim 10, it appears to be
uncontroverted that Bowman clearly teaches the first three steps
of the claimed method. The Bowman system differs, however, in
that it screens the respiratory monitor from the offending
interference of cardiac artifact, which is physiologically-
induced by heartbeat and blood flow through the heart, rather
than from "non-physiologically produced" EMI. However, as the
appellants have admitted on pages 2 and 3 of their specification,
non-physiologically produced EMI also was known to adversely
affect the operation of other patient monitoring systems. This
is confirmed in Brownlee and Howson, both of which provide a
second sensing system to detect the presence of the non-
physiologically induced EMI and to act in a manner which offsets
its effect.
From our prospective, in view of the knowledge in the art at
the time of the appellants' invention, it would have been obvious
to one of ordinary skill in the art to modify the Bowman method
by also sensing the presence of non-physiologically produced EMI
and sounding an alarm in such case. Considering that the use of
a second alarm system is taught by Bowman, suggestion for this
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