Appeal No. 1998-0061
Application No. 08/364,101
circumscribe the claimed invention with a reasonable degree of
precision and particularity. Id. at 1015, 194 USPQ at 193.
With regard to the § 103 rejection of claims 1 through 8,
10 through 18 and 20, the Fraden reference discloses a method
and apparatus in which a piezoelectric pad 10 is electrically
connected to a monitoring device 38 for monitoring a patient’s
heartbeat and respiration rates in an apnea detecting system
(see page 2, lines 72-82 of the Fraden specification). The
piezoelectric pad is in the form of a sheet and may be placed
on a bed between the patient and a patient support such as a
mattress under the mattress sheets so as not to directly
contact the patient’s body (see page 4, lines 10-16 of the
Fraden specification).
Like appellant’s piezoelectric pad, Fraden’s
piezoelectric pad senses the patient’s acoustic and
electromechanical transmissions to produce a voltage signal
having components representative of the patient’s heartbeat
and respiration rates. The voltage signal is transmitted by a
transmitter in the form of a cable 36 to the monitoring device
which analyzes the signal to recover the heartbeat and
respiration signal components from the complex voltage signal
5
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