Autonomous vehicles (AVs) offer a game-changing new platform that could provide a blizzard of diverse and lucrative consumer services. The revenues generated by such services are likely to eclipse those of driverless vehicle sales alone – as AVs offer valuable new ways for retailers to access their target markets.
Iprova is therefore extremely active in not only creating inventions that will help make AVs safer and more efficient, but also in creating AV-enabled inventions around valuable day-to-day consumer needs, from nutrition to entertainment to healthcare.
Our work
Our client, a leading Bay Area technology company, is aiming to develop inventions that could be the basis of high value services as part of its AV roadmap.
Iprova delivered cross-domain inventions that were both additive and complementary to those coming from the client’s own research teams. External patent attorneys appointed by our client evaluated our inventions and compared them to those of its own AV research group. The attorneys found Iprova’s inventions contained more new subject matter and also had better forward-looking commercialisation prospects. Iprova also won the best overall invention score.
Example invention
Iprova created an invention that allows an AV to carry out health checks on its passengers. The idea is that advanced sensors built into an AV allow the motion of the vehicle to be controlled in precise and predictable ways as it moves along the road – and, by making small variations in its motion, the vehicle can generate different forces that can be used to carry out a variety of human health checks.
The invention can be used to assess a passenger’s balance and core stability, or evaluate the body’s response to known stimuli. This will help passengers to easily check various aspects of their health, potentially enabling diagnostic features in AVs which might be used to identify early symptoms of conditions such as multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s disease or diabetes.