Appeal No. 2006-1504 Page 3
Application No. 09/935,297
complete reasoning in support of the rejections and to the appellant's brief (filed December 27,
2004) and reply brief (filed May 31, 2005) for the appellant's arguments thereagainst.
OPINION
In reaching our decision in this appeal, we have given careful consideration to the
appellant's specification and claims, to the applied prior art, and to the respective positions
articulated by the appellant and the examiner. As a consequence of our review, we make the
following determinations.
We turn our attention first to the rejection of claims 1, 2, 7, 15-17, 23, 26, 27 and 29 as
being anticipated by Rabin. Rabin discloses a scalp massager including a main supporting frame
12 capable of being stretched into an arc, as illustrated in Figure 1, for receiving a person’s head
and being resiliently biased to curl up on itself when at rest as shown in Figure 8. The frame 12
thus has an inherent bias when placed on a human head tending to hold it onto the human head.
The main frame 12 has a front end including a slot 14 accommodating a wing nut fastener
18 and a rear end including a hole that accommodates a wing nut fastener 16. A vibration
generating apparatus, including an electrical motor 28 and an off-center weight mechanism, is
mounted on the frame 12 between the fasteners 16, 18 for imparting vibration to the frame 12,
which vibration is transmitted to a temporal crosspiece 30 and an occiput crosspiece 32.
The appellant argues, on pages 11 and 12 of the brief, that Rabin does not disclose a
plurality of resilient fingers each having a free end and an opposite end and shaped such that in
use, when the device is lowered onto the head so that the head enters through an opening defined
by the juxtaposition of the free ends of the fingers, the free ends of the fingers apply pressure to
and massage the head, as recited in the appellant’s claims. For the following reasons, this
argument is not well taken.
The examiner finds that the frame 12, temporal crosspiece 30 and occiput crosspiece 32
respond to the plurality of resilient fingers of appellant’s claims. We agree. We note, in this
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