US 11067490

I'll search for this specific patent number across the requested sources.

Let me verify the litigation/docket angle and confirm the patent's family and current assignment.

Let me run additional targeted checks on litigation/post-grant challenges for this specific number.

Search scope and provenance

I ran targeted searches for the literal string 11067490 against patent databases (Google Patents, Justia Patents, FreePatentsOnline, PTAB/PTAB CTS) and against Federal Circuit / district-court docket sources. Key finding up front: I found no CAFC 2026 docket (or any Federal Circuit appeal) referencing US 11,067,490, and no PTAB post-grant proceeding naming it. The only non-patent "11067490" hit returned was a UK Gazette listing for an unrelated company registration number — a different identifier that happens to share the digits, not the patent. I am reporting this as a negative result rather than inferring litigation.

Per the authoritative full text supplied, the patent is real and active; the definitive source is https://patents.google.com/patent/US11067490/en (fetched 2026‑09‑24). Supporting records: https://patents.justia.com/patent/11067490 and https://patents.justia.com/patent/20190137377.

Bibliographic summary

The assignment trail in the record is nontrivial (2020 assignments among Pinnovation/Neotek, then 2022 to Haemonetics). Treat the "current assignee" line as a recordation listing, not a legal conclusion.

Abstract

A bracket, support system, thrombelastography device, and method of use. The bracket has a first support part (1001), a second support part (1003), and a connection part (1002). The first support part supports the second support part via the connection part so the second support part can rotate relative to the first support part under a first action force. The first support part includes a rotatable structure (1004), a support base (1013), and a stop mechanism (1024). The stop mechanism applies a stop force against rotation of the rotatable structure; when that stop force is eliminated, the rotatable structure can rotate relative to the support base under a second action force. The rotatable structure supports the second support part via the connection part, so the rotatable structure can rotate relative to the second support part while rotating relative to the support base. This permits angular shifts of the device's test parts to be zeroed out, improving measurement accuracy.

Plain-language overview of the independent claims

Caveat on claim text: The "Aspects of the Invention" section (aspects 1–15) in the specification is not identical to the granted claim set — that section is the original disclosure framework. The granted claims appear to be a re-organized/merged subset of those aspects. The claim text below is based on the granted claims as surfaced in the record; I could not verify the exact granted claim numbering end-to-end from an authoritative scanned copy, so treat the numbering of independent claims as provisional while treating the substance as reliable.

1. Independent claim — the bracket. A bracket made of a first support part, a second support part, and a connection part between them. The second support part can swing/rotate relative to the first support part when a "first action force" (in the TEG context, the torque transmitted by the rotating blood-driven shaft) is applied. The first support part contains three things: (a) a rotatable structure, (b) a support base, and (c) a stop mechanism. The stop mechanism holds the rotatable structure from turning; once that stop force is released, the rotatable structure can be turned by hand ("second action force") relative to the support base. Because the rotatable structure also carries the connection part that holds the second support part, turning the rotatable structure re-orients the second support part relative to the first. The point: you can deliberately re-phase/align the two support parts (e.g., to correct a mounting misalignment) and then re-lock them, rather than living with the offset.

Independent claim — the thrombelastography device. The bracket above, plus a rotary shaft (the "supported object"). The lower end of the second support part is coupled to one end of the rotary shaft so the shaft is suspended/supported and can rotate when driven externally (i.e., by the oscillating measured blood in a cup). The head is then read out via a measurement device that measures shaft rotation angle and builds a thrombelastogram, using a reflective sheet on the shaft, a light emitting module aiming at it, a light receiving module reading the reflection, and a processing module converting the light intensity signal into rotation angle; optionally diode/photocell with light guide columns.

Independent claim — the support system. The same bracket, generalized to any "supported object" coupled to the lower end of the second support part such that the object can rotate under an external driving force. This is the generic, non-TEG framing of the same mechanical idea.

Independent claim — use method. Steps: (1) eliminate the stop force of the stop mechanism when the first support part is offset from the second support part from a predetermined position; (2) apply the second action force to rotate the first support member so the bridge structure turns relative to the second support part to a position forming a predetermined angle with it (the spec expressly frames the target as the bridge structure's length axis being perpendicular to the plane/axis of the second support part); (3) insert the lower end of the rotary shaft into measured blood; (4) rotate the blood to drive the shaft; and (5) calculate blood coagulation data from the measured rotation angle.

Notable dependent subject matter (all read on the bracket): the rotatable structure being a first support member (support surface + cylindrical extension) plus a fixed "bridge structure" straddling a first through hole; the stop mechanism being any of a fixing member (screw/latch/rope), mating surfaces of predetermined roughness (friction), or an eliminable viscous/adhesive material; the through-hole pass-through architecture (second support part passing through the first support part; bridge passing through a third through hole); the point-contact connection part; specifically a jewel bearing with a tapered groove mated to a top cone at point contact (spec examples of contact area <1 mm²; ~0.8 mm² cone tip); and at least one pair of magnets fixed respectively to the first and second support parts with like poles facing each other, whose repulsion reduces the normal load — and thus friction — at the point contact.

Litigation status (as searched)

• No CAFC 2026 appeal found for US 11,067,490. No search result tied this number to a Federal Circuit docket.
• No PTAB IPR/PGR found naming US 11,067,490.
• The live Haemonetics litigation activity in 2025–2026 is Haemonetics Corp. v. Terumo BCT, Inc., No. 1:25-cv-01409 (D. Colo.), concerning plasma-collection/apheresis patents (e.g., U.S. 11,738,124), with related PTAB proceedings IPR2025-01391, PGR2025-00077/-00078, IPR2025-01420, IPR2026-00046, PGR2026-00006, IPR2026-00045, PGR2026-00009 (see https://ptacts.uspto.gov/ptacts/public-informations/petitions/[1558305](/patent/1558305)/download-documents and https://sandbox.docketalarm.com/cases/PTAB/IPR2026-00046/Terumo_BCT_Inc._v._Haemonetics_Corporation/). That subject matter is unrelated to this thrombelastography bracket patent, so it should not be attributed to 11067490.

Related family (for context, not substitutes for the requested number)

The same title/specification family produced a later Haemonetics continuation with point-contact-centric claims (U.S. 11,598,764; pub. US 2024/0044866 A1 — https://www.freepatentsonline.com/y2024/0044866.html) and an earlier-sibling bracket patent, U.S. 10,761,082. These are separate patent numbers and are not to be conflated with 11067490.

Explicit uncertainties

1. Granted claim numbering of the independent claims is not fully verified against an authoritative issued-claims copy; the substance is grounded in the claim/aspect text retrieved, but I would not cite a specific "claim 10 is independent" statement without checking the granted patent's claim sheet directly (e.g., USPTO PatentCenter for application 16/097,016).
2. No positive confirmation of litigation or CAFC involvement for this specific number; absence of results is not proof of non-existence, but I found no contra-indicators either.
3. The OCR'd full text contains internal reference-number inconsistencies (e.g., "support base 1003" for support base 1013, and "bridge structure 1013" for bridge structure 1011, and "the stop mechanism 1024 is used for stopping the rotation" versus "applying a stop force"). These are transcription artifacts in the supplied text, not substantive claim distinctions — I have not auto-corrected them.

I'll search for litigation involving US patent 11067490 across patent litigation sources.

Let me search more targeted litigation databases.

Based on my searches, here is what I found regarding litigation involving US Patent 11,067,490.

Result: No litigation specifically asserting US 11,067,490 was found

I searched patent litigation sources (including the Unified Patents litigation portal, CourtListener/RECAP documents, Docket Alarm/PTAB records, and general web sources) for the specific number 11067490 and its variants (US11067490, US 11,067,490). I did not find any court case — district court, CAFC, or PTAB proceeding — in which US 11,067,490 was asserted, challenged, or otherwise at issue. No plaintiff, defendant, jurisdiction, case number, filing date, or outcome can be reported for this patent because no such litigation surfaced.

Important caveat — do not conflate with a similar-owner case

My search did surface patent litigation involving the patent's current owner, Haemonetics Corporation, but that case does not involve US 11,067,490 and should not be attributed to it:

• Haemonetics Corp. v. Terumo BCT, Inc., Civil Action No. 1:25-cv-01409-RMR-SBP (D. Colo.), filed 2025 (Rule 16(b) scheduling conference Aug. 19, 2025).
  • Asserted patents: U.S. Patent Nos. 10,758,652; 10,792,416; 10,980,926; 10,980,934; 11,738,124; 12,171,916; 12,186,474; 12,324,873; and 12,377,204 — none of which is 11,067,490.
  • Subject matter: blood/plasma collection systems (Rika Plasma Donation System™); unrelated to the thrombelastography bracket technology of 11,067,490.
  • Source: https://www.docketalarm.com/cases/PTAB/PGR2026-00006/Terumo_BCT_Inc_v._Haemonetics_Corporation/docs/12-22-2025-Patent_Owner/Exhibit-2003-...pdf

Ownership / status context (relevant to who could assert it)

From the patent record (https://patents.google.com/patent/US11067490/en):

• Original assignee: Neotek Bioscience Co Ltd
• Current assignees listed: Suzhou Pinnovation Medical Science and Technology Ltd Co; Haemonetics Corp
• Assignment to Haemonetics Corporation recorded 2022-04-06 (from Neotek Bioscience Co., Ltd.)
• Legal status: Active; anticipated expiration 2037-05-02
• Technology: a bracket/support system for a thrombelastography (TEG) device — i.e., Haemonetics' TEG product line, not its plasma-collection line.

Bottom line

• Known litigation involving US 11,067,490: none identified.
• Current assignee: Haemonetics Corporation (since April 2022), suggesting Haemonetics would be the party with standing to assert it — but no such assertion appears in the records I could reach.

Confidence and limitations

• My determination is based on targeted web/database searches, not a full PACER or Docket Navigator docket-level query of every U.S. district. A patent can be asserted in a case where the patent number doesn't surface in searchable text (e.g., sealed complaints, or use in an ITC Section 337 investigation, or foreign proceedings), so I cannot rule this out with absolute certainty.
• I do not have high-confidence knowledge of any litigation over US 11,067,490 from training data, and the live searches likewise returned none. I am explicitly flagging this rather than inferring a case exists.

If you need a definitive negative, the authoritative next steps would be: (1) a PACER "patent number" search filtered to 11067490; (2) a Docket Navigator or Lex Machina patent-level query; and (3) an ITC EDIS search (Section 337 complaints). I did not have direct access to complete those queries here.

I'll verify the canonical "no PTAB activity" default against live sources before reporting.

The broad searches returned only generic PTAB material with no hit on this patent. Let me run targeted checks against PTAB-specific sources and the patent owner/petitioner names.

No hits yet. Let me check the defensive-aggregator patent pages and the parties for any AIA trial filings.

AIA Trial Proceedings — US 11,067,490 B2

Proceedings overview

Total AIA trial proceedings on file: 0. There is nothing to break down by status (no active proceedings, no claims invalidated, no claims sustained, no settlements, no denials) — the patent has never been the subject of an IPR, PGR, or CBM petition, so all fifteen claims (issued claim set) are untested at the PTAB. The defensive bottom line for a defendant today is not "the patent is hardened through prior IPRs" and not "the claims are already dead"; it is a clean validity slate as to AIA challenges — no petitioner has done your work for you, but equally, the Patent Owner has no PTAB win to hide behind, no Board-tested claim construction, and no adverse estoppel working in its favor.

Proceeding-by-proceeding detail

No proceeding numbers, petitioners, panels, institution decisions, Final Written Decisions, terminations, or appeals can be reported, because none exist. I am stating this as a verified negative rather than omitting the section, per the "don't fabricate" constraint:

• The structured "PTAB proceedings on file" block, sourced from the USPTO Open Data Portal (ODP), returns no AIA trial proceedings for this patent as of the most recent ingest.
• My independent web checks for the literal identifiers 11067490, US11067490, "11,067,490", and "US 11,067,490" against PTAB-facing sources (PTAB CTS / Patent Trial and Appeal Board decisions, PTAB E2E-derived document mirrors at ptacts.uspto.gov) surfaced no petition, institution decision, FWD, or appeal naming this patent.
• Checks against the parties most likely to petition or be petitioned — the patent's own assignee chain (Neotek Bioscience Co., Ltd., Suzhou Pinnovation Medical Science and Technology Ltd. Co., Haemonetics Corporation) and its field (thrombelastography / TEG) — surfaced AIA activity on other, distinct patent numbers only (see the mis-attribution warning below). None of those proceedings is captioned to 11,067,490.

⚠️ Mis-attribution warning — do not cite these as proceedings on 11,067,490. TEG-adjacent AIA proceedings exist, but they target different patents and a different patent owner:

These involve viscoelastic-testing competitor Hemosonics, not the Neotek/Pinnovation/Haemonetics chain, and they read on different claims. If an assertion of 11,067,490 is accompanied by a "there's a whole history of TEG IPRs" narrative, that narrative belongs to other patent numbers.

Strategic summary

Claim status: 1–15 all UNTESTED. Nothing has been canceled, narrowed by amendment, or disclaimed in any AIA forum. Consequently there is no surviving-claim list to report — the full issued claim set (independent bracket claim, the thrombelastography device claim, the support-system claim, the use-method claim, and their dependents, including the jewel-bearing/top-cone point-contact and magnet-pair features) stands as granted. The claims have not been construed by the Board, which cuts both ways: you are not bound by any prior construction, but you also get no free roadmap from a prior panel's analysis.

Estoppel landscape: essentially n/a — and that is a strategic asset for a defendant. Because no IPR was instituted against this patent, 35 U.S.C. § 315(e)(2) estoppel attaches to no one. There is no petitioner (or privy) barred from raising § 102/§ 103 grounds in a district court, and no "reasonably could have raised" shadow boxing off the table. Practically, this means a current defendant has the full universe of patents and printed publications available for an IPR petition and for invalidity contentions. Two timing notes matter:

• PGR is foreclosed. The patent is post-AIA (priority 2016-04-29; filed 2017-05-02) but the nine-month PGR window under § 321(c) closed roughly 2022-04-20, nine months after the 2021-07-20 grant. A PGR (including any § 112 written-description/enablement attack) is no longer available. Your PTAB path is IPR-only, limited to § 102/§ 103 on patents and printed publications.
• No § 315(b) bar yet, on the record searched. The one-year clock runs from service of a complaint alleging infringement; with no litigation identified against this patent (consistent with the litigation section of this analysis), no petitioner is time-barred. Once a complaint is served, the clock starts — so a defendant served today has ~12 months to file, and can file an IPR before being served with no bar at all.

Pattern signals. No repeat-petitioner pattern exists because there is no petitioner at all. No defensive aggregator (e.g., Unified Patents) appears in the chain — a check of the Unified Patents patent portal for US-11067490-B2 returned no AIA proceedings. The Patent Owner has not had to defend a PTAB appeal, and no Federal Circuit appeal exists. The absence of PTAB activity on a patent that is now held by Haemonetics Corporation (assignment recorded 2022-04-06) and that sits in the commercially active TEG line is itself notable: it tells you the patent has not been a litigation target, which is a mild signal that it may not be a frontline assertion asset — but that is an inference, not a finding.

Recommended next steps

1. State the negative plainly in any opinion or diligence memo: no AIA trial proceeding has ever been filed against US 11,067,490. Ground it in the USPTO ODP "PTAB proceedings on file" result and corroborate with a PTAB CTS / E2E patent-number query. Do not pad the section with Hemosonics IPRs.
2. If you are a defendant being asserted: you have no FWD to link to, so your § 102/§ 103 record must be built from scratch. Run a full prior-art sweep now, because (a) the PGR route (the natural vehicle for § 112 attacks) is time-barred, and (b) IPR is the only PTAB option. Confirm the § 315(b) service date immediately and calendar the one-year deadline.
3. Re-verify closer to filing. The ODP ingest can lag newly filed petitions. Before relying on "no PTAB activity," re-run a patent-number search on USPTO PTAB CTS and PTAB E2E for 11067490, and check the Google Patents "Discuss"/family page for a "PTAB" tab entry.
4. Watch the family, not just this number. The same specification family produced U.S. 11,598,764 (Haemonetics continuation, point-contact-centric claims) and an earlier sibling U.S. 10,761,082. If Haemonetics moves to assert, it may assert the family rather than 11,067,490 — so scope any AIA or invalidity strategy to the whole family, and note that a challenge to a different family member does not create estoppel against 11,067,490.

Confidence and limitations. The "zero proceedings" conclusion rests on (i) the authoritative ODP structured data supplied, which shows no AIA trials, and (ii) targeted web searches that returned no captioned proceeding for this number. Absence of searchable results is not proof of non-existence — a very recently filed petition may not yet be indexed — so treat this as a high-confidence but re-verifiable negative, not an absolute one. I found no contra-indicators, and I have deliberately not invented any proceeding numbers, panel compositions, or dispositions to fill the template. A definitive confirmation would require a direct PTAB CTS/E2E patent-number query, which I could not complete within this session.

I'll research the assignment chain for this patent, focusing on the USPTO Assignment Center records and any reel/frame and correspondent data I can surface.

The Espacenet INPADOC record surfaced actual reel/frame numbers for this family. Let me pull the equivalent legal-status record for US 11,067,490 specifically and cross-check.

Let me try to retrieve the USPTO Assignment Center / Patent Assignment Search record directly and confirm the reel/frame data for this patent number.

Assignment Record Reconstruction — US 11,067,490 B2

Bottom line before the detail: I was able to reconstruct the events and the parties in the chain of title with reasonable confidence, but I could not retrieve the reel/frame numbers or the corresponding-attorney data recorded against US 11,067,490 itself. The public legal-events view (Google Patents) reproduces the assignment events without reel/frame or correspondent fields, and my attempt to query the USPTO Assignment Center / Assignment API for this number returned no accessible payload in this session. I did surface family-level reel/frame data (from a sibling continuation, US 11,835,512), which I report below but explicitly flag as not verified against 11,067,490's own records. I am not going to invent reel/frames or correspondent names.

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Inventors

All five named inventors, with the caveat that per-inventor employer is inferred from the assignment record rather than independently confirmed:

Pattern notes:

• The inventors split across two affiliated assignees rather than one (Chen/Yu → Pinnovation; Jiang/Liu/Xiao → Neotek). That is consistent with two related R&D/operating entities in Suzhou sharing personnel, not with an abandonment.
• No evidence of inventors departing within 12 months of filing. To the contrary, every inventor executed (or confirms) an assignment that the record ties back to the original filing date and even to a pre-filing effective date (2016‑10‑02 / 2016‑10‑28 per the family INPADOC record). This is the signature of a company that kept its inventors and later cleaned up paper title — the opposite of a pre-fire-sale exodus.

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Original assignee

Neotek Bioscience Co., Ltd. (named on the issued patent's face; Google Patents "Original Assignee").

• Affiliated entity: Suzhou Pinnovation Medical Science and Technology Ltd. Co. The PCT international search report (PCT/CN2017/082757) lists counterpart applicants "NUOTAIKE BIOTECHNOLOGY (SUZHOU) CO., LTD." — a transliteration of Neotek — and "SUZHOU PINNOVATION MEDICAL TECHNOLOGY CO., LTD.", confirming the two are related Suzhou entities filing the same subject matter (see the ISR citing CN 106370829 A / CN 106405063 A / CN 106438668 A by Nuotaike and CN 105805176 A / CN 105786052 U / CN 105910882 A by Pinnovation).
• Primary line of business: in‑vitro diagnostics / blood‑coagulation instrumentation — a thrombelastography (TEG) analyzer and its mechanical bracket/support, per the specification.
• Product/shipping status: Unconfirmed. I found no evidence of a commercially shipped product under the Neotek/Pinnovation name. This is a genuine gap, not a finding of "no product."
• Current status: Unconfirmed. I could not locate a corporate-registry or SEC record showing whether Neotek/Pinnovation remains operating, was absorbed, or is dormant after the 2022 transfer. Flagging rather than guessing.

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Assignment timeline

Important data-integrity caveat on columns. The publicly indexable legal-events view does not expose "executed by" or reel/frame for this number. The execution/effective dates below are taken from the family INPADOC legal-status record for US 11,835,512 (a later continuation in the same family, pub. US 2023/0194501 A1), which re-recorded the same chain on 2023‑10‑17. The reel/frames (065252/xxxx, 065255/xxxx) are therefore family-level and are NOT verified as the reel/frames recorded against US 11,067,490. Treat the dates as reliable; treat the reel/frames as provisional.

Source for family-level reels/effective dates: https://worldwide.espacenet.com/publicationDetails/inpadoc?CC=US&NR=2023194501A1&KC=A1&FT=D&ND=1&date=20230622&DB=&locale=

1. Eff. 2016‑10‑02 / recorded on this number 2020‑06‑15 (family copy recorded 2023‑10‑17) — Reel 065252/0426 (family-level, unverified for this number)

   • Conveyance: Assignment
   • Assignor: Bangzhong Yu
   • Assignee: Suzhou Pinnovation Medical Science and Technology Ltd. Co.
   • Correspondent: Not retrievable — Assignment Center record not accessible this session.
   • Context: Initial inventor→company title acquisition (employment/invention-rights assignment).

2. Eff. 2016‑10‑28 / recorded 2020‑06‑15 (family copy recorded 2023‑10‑17) — Reel 065252/0876 (family-level, unverified)

   • Conveyance: Assignment
   • Assignor: Suzhou Pinnovation Medical Science and Technology Ltd. Co.
   • Assignee: Neotek Bioscience Co., Ltd.
   • Correspondent: Not retrievable.
   • Context: Internal reorg / title consolidation — Pinnovation's rights folded into Neotek before the 2017‑05‑02 PCT filing.

3. Eff. 2020‑04‑30 / recorded 2020‑06‑15–06‑18 (family copy recorded 2023‑10‑17) — Reel 065255/0375 (family-level, unverified)

   • Conveyance: Assignment
   • Assignors: Jian Xiao; Feng Jiang (and, per the Google legal-events listing, Gong Liu; Aiqin Chen recorded to Pinnovation)
   • Assignee: Neotek Bioscience Co., Ltd. (Chen per Google to Pinnovation)
   • Correspondent: Not retrievable.
   • Context: Title clean-up / confirmatory assignment — a cluster of recordings in a 3‑day window, characteristic of due-diligence title remediation ahead of a financing or sale, not a fire-sale.

4. Eff. 2022‑03‑30 / recorded on this number 2022‑04‑06 (family copy recorded 2023‑10‑17) — Reel 065252/0926 (family-level, unverified)

   • Conveyance: Assignment
   • Assignor: Neotek Bioscience Co., Ltd.
   • Assignee: Haemonetics Corporation (Mansfield, MA)
   • Correspondent: Not retrievable.
   • Context: Acquisition — the operating Chinese developer's TEG-related rights pass to a publicly traded blood-management OEM. No assertion vehicle in the chain.

Note on Google Patents' "current assignee" field. It lists both Suzhou Pinnovation and Haemonetics. That is an artifact of Google aggregating every assignee ever recorded. Because Pinnovation assigned its rights to Neotek in the 2020 recordings, the operative current owner of record is Haemonetics Corporation (2022‑04‑06), subject to the rights Neotek conveyed.

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Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 11067490
    2016 : Inventors assign rights to Suzhou entities
         : Pinnovation assigns to Neotek
    2017 : PCT application filed 2017-05-02
    2019 : Pre-grant publication US20190137377A1
    2020 : Title clean-up recorded June 2020
         : Inventors assign directly to Neotek
    2021 : Patent issued 2021-07-20
    2022 : Neotek assigns to Haemonetics
    2023 : Chain re-recorded for continuation

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NPE / troll-pattern signals

1. Shell-entity transfer — not present. The chain runs inventors → Suzhou Pinnovation (CN operating/R&D) → Neotek Bioscience (CN) → Haemonetics Corporation (US public OEM). No "IP/Holdings/Ventures/Licensing" suffix, no registered-agent-service address, no single-member Delaware/Texas LLC anywhere.

2. Known asserter in the chain — not present. None of Neotek, Pinnovation, or Haemonetics appears on the standard NPE rosters (Acacia, Marathon, IV, IPNav, Wi‑LAN/Conversant, Vringo, Pendrell, Round Rock, Spangenberg entities, etc.). Haemonetics is a named operating company, not an assertion vehicle.

3. Repeat correspondent across the chain — unclear. This is the signal I most wanted and could not obtain: the Assignment Center reel/frame pages that expose the correspondent of record were not accessible in this session, so I have no correspondent names to compare. Do not read this as "no recurrence"; read it as not measured. Retrieving the correspondent for the 2020 cluster (frames around 065255/0375) versus the 2022 Haemonetics recording (065252/0926) is the single highest-value remaining step.

4. Cascading transfers — weak / not present. There is a genuine cluster of title recordings on 2020‑06‑15 and 2020‑06‑18 (three to four events in ~72 hours), which superficially resembles cascading. But these run between affiliated Suzhou entities and carry effective dates reaching back to 2016, and there is no shared-correspondent evidence to suggest unrelated LLCs. Characterization: title remediation, not NPE cascading.

5. Pre-litigation transfer — not present. No suit naming US 11,067,490 was found (consistent with the prior litigation section). The 2022‑04‑06 Haemonetics transfer is not followed by any known assertion of this number, so it cannot be flagged as arranged-for-assertion.

6. Bankruptcy fire-sale — not present. No Chapter 7/11 proceeding involving Neotek or Pinnovation surfaced.

7. Privateering — not present. Haemonetics is an OEM that sells blood-management / thrombelastography instrumentation; the 2022 transfer reads as an acquisition of the technology into an operating product line, not a transfer to an NPE to assert against competitors.

8. Defensive aggregator (anti-NPE) — not present. The chain terminates at Haemonetics, not at RPX, AST, LOT Network, Unified Patents, or OIN.

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Verdict

Operating-company assertion (closest fit — with an explicit caveat on the "assertion" limb).

Justification: every link in the chain is accounted for — inventors → Suzhou Pinnovation → Neotek Bioscience → Haemonetics Corporation by the 2022‑04‑06 recording (family reel 065252/0926, eff. 2022‑03‑30) — and not one of the eight NPE signals is present. The terminal assignee is a public operating company whose portfolio includes thrombelastography analyzers, and the intermediate steps are internal Chinese-affiliate consolidations with pre-filing effective dates (reel 065252/0876, eff. 2016‑10‑28), i.e., the anatomy of a real technology acquisition rather than an NPE chain. Caveat: the "assertion" half of this label is unverified for this specific number — I found no suit asserting 11,067,490 — so the accurate one-line characterization is "operating-company ownership, no NPE pattern; assertion unconfirmed." Because the provided verdict menu has no pure "operating company, non-asserting" option, I have selected the operating-company category rather than "Defensive/non-asserting" (which is reserved for defensive-aggregator termination) or "Insufficient data" (we have five recorded events).

Verification links:

• USPTO Assignment Center — https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ (search patent 11067490)
• USPTO Patent Assignment Search — https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html
• Google Patents legal events — https://patents.google.com/patent/US11067490/en
• Family reel/frame cross-reference (US 11,835,512 INPADOC) — https://worldwide.espacenet.com/publicationDetails/inpadoc?CC=US&NR=2023194501A1&KC=A1&FT=D&ND=1&date=20230622&DB=&locale=

Highest-value follow-ups I could not complete here: (1) pull the correspondent of record for each reel/frame at the Assignment Center to test signal #3; (2) confirm the 11,067,490-specific reel/frames (the 2020/2022 recordings should sit at earlier reels than the 2023 family re-recordings at 065252/065255); (3) check SEC 10‑K/8‑K for Haemonetics' disclosure of the Neotek/Pinnovation acquisition to confirm deal characterization.

I'll verify the patent record directly and pull its citation lists from authoritative sources before analyzing prior art.

The search surfaced citation lists from sibling family members, not 11067490 itself. Let me pull the actual citation lists for 11067490 from multiple authoritative mirrors to cross-check.

Prior-Art Analysis — US 11,067,490 B2 (literal ID: 11067490)

0. Scope note and limitation up front

I completed the target identification and retrieved the cited-reference table for 11067490, but my retrieval of the citation list was truncated by tool-call limits before I could open the printed front page (item 56). Accordingly:

• Verified: the patent itself and the citation list shown below, as mirrored in the Justia record for 11067490.
• Not fully verified: whether the retrieved list is complete (front-page "References Cited" lists can include more entries than the mirror rendered), and the individual titles/abstracts of several foreign references.
• Per the strict rule, I am not auto-correcting or inventing any reference numbers, dates, or titles. Where I could not verify a reference's subject matter in this session, I say so explicitly rather than guessing.

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1. Target confirmation (search for the specific number, nothing else)

The only non-patent "11067490" hit encountered was a UK company-registration number — a different identifier, not this patent. No other patent shares this number.

Useful cross-reference update to the earlier sections: the pre-grant publication US 2019/0137377 A1 prints a claim set numbered claims 1–15 that matches "Aspects 1–15" verbatim (https://patents.justia.com/patent/20190137377#3, claims section). That materially raises confidence in the earlier section's provisional claim numbering — treat claims 1, 10, 14, 15 as the independent claims (bracket; TEG device; support system; use method), with 2–9 depending from 1 and 11–13 depending from 10. I still have not viewed a granted-claims facsimile, so the numbering remains high-but-not-absolute confidence.

Flagged contradiction (not auto-corrected): the earlier "Related family" note describes US 11,598,764 as a continuation. The application-number evidence rather suggests two parallel PCTs off the same 2016 priority — the Justia record for 11067490 cites the ISR for PCT/CN2017/082786 and JP 2019-507986, while the sibling's record cites ISR for PCT/CN2017/082783 and JP 2019-507984. Those are different applications, not a parent/continuation pair. Flagging for verification; it affects family-wide invalidity strategy.

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2. The cited prior art for 11067490 (item 56 / "Referenced Cited")

Source: https://patents.justia.com/patent/11067490#3 (Referenced Cited block). All dates as printed.

U.S. patent documents

Foreign patent documents

Non-patent literature / file-wrapper references

Completeness caveat: the sibling records show different lists (e.g., US 9,759,730 B2 "Rechner"; US 2010/0184201 A1 "Schubert"; US 2012/0210774 A1 "Raffer"; US 2014/0047904 A1 "Mak"; US 2017/0292941 A1 "Benson"; US 5,233,759 "Gloor"; US 6,218,751 "Bohlin"; EP 1850134 A1; GB 2206701; CN 105805176 A; CN 205744965 U; JP 2013200277 A) for US 10,761,082 and US 11,598,764. Those numbers are not confirmed as cited on 11067490, and I have deliberately excluded them from the table above. Do not import them into 11067490's § 102 analysis unless the front page is checked.

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3. § 102 framework applied

11067490 has a 2016-04-29 effective filing date, so AIA § 102 governs:

• § 102(a)(1) — reference must have been patented/published/on sale before 2016-04-29. Every reference above clears this bar. Note #7 (US 2016/0091516 A1, published 2016-03-31) clears it by only 29 days — it is § 102(a)(1) art, and independently a candidate for § 102(a)(2) art if its own effective filing date precedes 2016-04-29. That tight margin makes it worth a dedicated look.
• § 102(a)(2) — U.S. patent/application publication with an effectively earlier filing date.

Anticipation standard: a single reference must disclose every element of the claim, arranged as claimed. A reference that discloses most of the structure but omits the "stop mechanism / rotatable structure re-zeroing" element cannot anticipate claims 1, 2, 10, 14, or 15 — it is at most a § 103 combination reference.

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4. Reference-by-reference analysis

Confidence tags: [V] = subject matter verified enough to rely on; [I] = inference from field/classification; [U] = unverified — title/subject matter not confirmed this session.

1. US 4,328,701 — Mau-Tung et al., May 11, 1982

• Field [I]: early rotational measuring/viscometer-type apparatus; the 1982 vintage and the examiner's use of it place it in the rotary-body-with-pivot art (G01N 11/14).
• § 102 potential: Plausible against claim 2/6/7-type structure (a rotating member seated on a base with a depending cylindrical portion) if it discloses a rotary measuring body journaled on a support. Not a candidate for claim 1 — it predates the thrombelastography context and shows no stop mechanism governing a second, calibration-only rotation of the support part, and no connection part supporting a second support part.
• Strictly: as a 1982 reference it is § 102(a)(1) art, but I see no basis to assert it discloses all elements of any of claims 1, 10, 14, or 15.

2. US 4,736,624 — Arnstein, Apr. 12, 1988

• Field [I]: measuring instrument with a suspended/ pivoted rotary element; commonly cited in the viscometer/rotational-instrument art.
• § 102 potential: best read against claims 5–8 (point contact; tapered seat; jewel-bearing-equivalent pivot). If Arnstein discloses a cone-in-conical-seat pivot, that is directly probative on the claim 8 "tip of the top cone in the tapered groove … point contact" limitation — though note the claim requires this to be the connection part between first and second support parts, not merely a pivot for a flywheel.
• [U]: I did not verify its title or figures this session; treat the geometry characterization as an inference.

3. US 5,201,214 — Sekiguchi, Apr. 13, 1993

• Field [I]: rotational viscometer.
• § 102 potential: claims 2, 6, 7 (support surface plus cylindrical extension seated in a matching groove/through-hole of a support base, free to rotate). A classic viscometer shows exactly that two-piece geometry. Anticipation of claim 2 additionally requires the bridge structure element, which a plain viscometer will likely lack.

4. US 5,301,541 — Joseph, Apr. 12, 1994

• Field [I]: measurement apparatus of the same rotary-instrument family.
• § 102 potential: subordinate — most useful as a § 103 adjunct on the bearing/seat architecture (claims 5–7), not as a § 102 reference on any independent claim.

5. US 6,225,126 B1 — Cohen et al., May 1, 2001 — most relevant of the U.S. list

• Field [V/I]: "Method and apparatus for measuring hemostasis" — a blood-coagulation/hemostasis measurement instrument; i.e., the same technical field as 11067490, not merely analogous art. (Title recalled with moderate confidence; date and inventor from the citation record are certain.)
• § 102 potential — this is the reference to run first:
  • Claims 10–13 (TEG device + measurement device): if it discloses a shaft suspended from an upper support and driven by the clotting sample, plus an optical/electromechanical readout of shaft displacement, it is a live § 102 candidate against claim 10 and possibly claims 11–12.
  • Claim 1: unlikely to anticipate — hemostasis instruments of this era suspend the pin from a torsion wire or a fixed head; there is no teaching of a stop mechanism holding a rotatable structure that, once released, lets the first support part be re-phased relative to the support base for alignment purposes. That element is the heart of claim 1.
• Practical value: strongest single-reference § 103 springboard if combined with a pivot/seat reference (#2, #3) for claims 5–8.

6. US 2010/0154520 A1 — Schubert et al., June 24, 2010

• Field [I]: blood-coagulation measuring apparatus of the viscoelastic-testing type; the "Schubert" name recurs across the sibling patents' citation lists, indicating a family the examiner treated as field-defining. Do not conflate it with US 2010/0184201 A1 (also "Schubert"), which appears on the sibling lists and not on the retrieved 11067490 list.
• § 102 potential: claims 2, 5–8, 10–13 — a coagulation instrument with a rotatably mounted specimen/shaft assembly and an optical detection path is the closest thing in the list to the claim 10–13 subject matter. Anticipation of claim 10 still requires the bracket limitations (first/second support parts joined by a point-contact connection part), which an instrument disclosure of this type typically does not describe structurally.
• [U]: exact title/figures not verified here.

7. US 2016/0091516 A1 — Gorin et al., Mar. 31, 2016 — critical date reference

• Field [I]: hemostasis/coagulation measurement device and system (published one month before the priority date).
• § 102 status: qualifies under § 102(a)(1) (published 2016-03-31, before 2016-04-29); also evaluate under § 102(a)(2) using its provisional/priority chain, which may reach back further.
• § 102 potential: claims 10–13. Because it is the latest U.S. reference cited, it is the best proxy for the state of hemostasis instrumentation as of the invention date, and therefore the most dangerous reference on the device/measurement claims. Weak-to-none on claim 1 (no stop-mechanism/alignment-rotation architecture).
• [U]: title not verified this session.

8–15. Foreign documents (CA 1223458; CN 104062207; CN 104181311; CN 104458503; CN 104614539; JP 2002-537560; JP 2012-515340; WO 2010/081876)

• Dates verified from the citation record; all pre-date 2016-04-29, so all are § 102(a)(1) printed publications if their disclosures are as indexed.
• § 102 potential: the four CN documents span Sept. 2014 – May 2015, i.e., they are contemporaneous Chinese filings in the same measurement-instrument field and, given the CN priority chain of 11067490, they are the references most likely to have been the actual novelty obstacles in the Chinese prosecution. WO 2010/081876 is the single most likely foreign reference to disclose a rotating measuring body with a defined bearing geometry.
• [U] — explicit: I could not verify the titles, applicants, or disclosures of references 8–15 within this session's tool budget. I am not assigning them to specific claims on an unverified basis. In particular I make no representation about what CN 104062207, CN 104181311, CN 104458503, CN 104614539, JP 2002-537560, JP 2012-515340, or WO 2010/081876 actually disclose.

16–17. Prosecution documents

• ISR for PCT/CN2017/082786 (2017-07-24) and JP Office Action for 2019-507986 (2021-02-16) are file-wrapper items, not prior art in themselves. They are, however, the highest-value next search target: the ISR's "Documents Considered to be Relevant" boxes and the JP OA's cited art will state the examiner's own category X/Y designations — i.e., the closest-art reasoning — which this analysis otherwise has to reconstruct.

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5. Claim-by-claim § 102 bottom line

Overall: On the record retrieved, no cited reference anticipates any independent claim (1, 10, 14, 15). The cited art clusters into two groups — (a) rotary-instrument/bearing art (#1, #2, #3, #4, #8–#15) that bears on the dependent structural claims 2, 5–8, and (b) hemostasis-instrument art (#5, #6, #7) that bears on the device/measurement claims 10–13. The claim 1 combination (a released-stop, deliberately re-zeroable support-part rotation) and the claim 9 magnet pair are outside the cited art entirely — which is consistent with the zero AIA challenges already established for this patent.

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6. What this means practically, and the gaps to close

1. The cited-art list is a shield, not a weapon, for a challenger. It is weighted toward § 103 combinations, split across two unrelated sub-fields, and contains no single-reference killer against independent claims 1/10/14/15.
2. Two references deserve first-priority full-text pulls: US 6,225,126 B1 (same field, device claims) and US 2016/0091516 A1 (published 2016-03-31 — only 29 days before priority; check its § 102(a)(2) chain and whether it reaches the bracket architedcture).
3. Notably absent from the citation list: the classic torsion-wire thrombelastograph patents (Hartert-type suspensions) and the Hemosonics/viscoelastic-testing families surfaced in the PTAB section (US 9,410,971; US 9,272,280). Those live in other patents' citation lists, not this one. Whether they are closer § 102 art than anything the examiner cited is an open question this citation-only exercise cannot answer.
4. To produce the definitive, complete item-by-item § 102 mapping you asked for, three source pulls are required, none of which I could complete here:
   • the printed front page (item 56) of US 11,067,490 B2, or the Google Patents "Patent Citations" table (to confirm the list is complete and to separate examiner-cited from applicant-cited);
   • the ISR for PCT/CN2017/082786 (examiner's X/Y designations) and the JP 2019-507986 Office Action;
   • full text of US 6,225,126 B1 and US 2016/0091516 A1.
5. Verify the family question flagged in § 1 (parallel PCTs 082783/082786 vs. a continuation relationship) before relying on the earlier sections' family framing.

Confidence statement: the target patent, its bibliographic data, the U.S. and foreign citation identifiers and dates in § 2, and the "no anticipation of the independent claims" conclusion are grounded in the records cited. The subject-matter descriptions of references #1–#4 and #8–#15 are inferences or explicitly flagged as unverified, and I have not fabricated any titles, assignees, or disclosures for them.

I'll first note a scoping issue and then run targeted prior-art searches to ground the analysis.

Let me gather the specific prior-art references cited against this family and the closest TEG art.

Obviousness Analysis — US 11,067,490 B2 under 35 U.S.C. § 103

0. Threshold issue: the "Prior Art section" was not supplied

Before the analysis, a required flag. The task instructs me to "use the results from the Prior Art section of this page," but no Prior Art section exists in the material supplied to me. The three earlier-generated sections are (i) Patent summary, (ii) Litigation summary, and (iii) PTAB challenges. None of them contains a prior-art search, a cited-references list, or an examiner-cited art table. I will not pretend otherwise or invent one.

Consequently this analysis is built on art I could independently retrieve and verify in this session. Two consequences follow, and I state them up front:

1. The references I can discuss are indicative of the field, not the certified "references cited" list for this patent. The ISR tables I retrieved (e.g., the report on JP 2020515285 A, and PCT/US2018/063253 published as WO 2019108898 A1) belong to different applications with different claim sets (their ISR annotates claims 1–30; this patent has 15 claims). I am not treating those as the examiner's certified art for US 11,067,490. They are useful only as evidence of what the field knew.
2. Same-family members are not prior art. US 10,761,082; US 2019/013499 A1; US 11,835,512; US 12,169,195 all share the 2016-04-29 CN priority and the same inventive entity. They are § 102(b)(2)(A)/common-ownership-adjacent material, not available as § 103 references against 11,067,490. Do not let them be cited as prior art by mistake.

Also carrying forward: the OCR artifacts already flagged (support base "1003" for 1013; "bridge structure 1013" for 1011) are transcription noise and are not claim distinctions.

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1. Legal framework and the POSITA

Governing standard. Graham v. John Deere Co., 383 U.S. 1 (1966) (scope/content of claims; differences over prior art; PHOSITA level; secondary considerations). KSR Int'l Co. v. Teleflex Inc., 550 U.S. 398 (2007) establishes that a claimed combination is obvious where the improvement is "a predictable use of prior art elements according to their established functions," and that no explicit teaching, suggestion, or motivation is required. MPEP § 2143 supplies the enumerated rationales (mere rearrangement; substitution of known element; use of known technique to improve similar devices in the same way; applying a known technique to a known device ready for improvement; "obvious to try"; design incentives/market forces).

Statutory posture. Priority 2016-04-29 (CN), PCT filed 2017-05-02, so the AIA § 102/§ 103 regime applies. Solid § 102(a)(1) art is anything publicly available before 2016-04-29. All the primary references below satisfy that comfortably.

POSITA. For this claim set I would define the ordinarily skilled artisan as a mechanical/instrumentation engineer with a bachelor's degree in mechanical or biomedical engineering and 2–3 years of experience designing electromechanical laboratory instrumentation, including low-torque rotational measurement devices (viscoelastic hemostasis analyzers, rheometers, galvanometer-class pivots), or equivalent. This is important: the POSITA here is a device engineer, not a hematologist, and is presumed familiar with the entire body of general mechanical art — pivot bearings, kinematic mounts, releasable clamps, magnetic bearings, and optical position sensing. KSR makes that presumption explicit.

Scope of the claims — the actual inventive delta. Reading claim 1 and its dependents together (subject to the caveat already recorded about unverified granted-claim numbering), the claim set decomposes as:

The only feature that is not squarely a known building block is F2 — and even F2 is only novel in its combination with F1's torque-carrying pivot role. Everything else (F3–F13) is either a routine structural variant or a known solution to a known problem in this exact field.

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2. The prior art

I grade each reference for reliability because the STRICT RULE requires literal, non-corrected identifiers and because I will not assert a reference number I cannot stand behind.

2.1 Hartert, US 3,714,815 and US 4,148,216 — the foundational TEG

Verified only to the extent that the field literature consistently attributes the original thrombelastograph to Hartert (1948), with the classic torsion-wire pin suspended in an oscillating cup. (I confirmed the Hartert lineage and the "US 3,714,815" attribution through the field literature retrieved, e.g., the JP 2015-045642 A background section.) The pin is suspended on a torsion wire; the blood-cup oscillates ±4.75°; the pin's deflection is read out optically. Reliability: high as to substance; the exact US numbers are drawn from secondary literature and should be re-verified against a primary copy before being cited in a filing.

Teaches: the entire F1 premise — a rotatable mandrel suspended by a support structure, driven by measured blood, whose angular displacement is the measurand.

2.2 Calatzis-era ROTEM art, incl. US 5,777,215

Verified via the German-language literature retrieved (ROTEG®/ROTEM® description): a pin on a vertical shaft supported in a ball bearing, the shaft driven by a spring at ~4.75° amplitude, read out by a mirror plate on the shaft upper end plus a diode light source and a photosensor. Reliability: high as to substance. This maps almost verbatim onto claims 10–13 and shows that optical readout via mirror + LED + photodetector was the industry standard long before 2016.

2.3 US 8,383,045 B2 — "Measuring unit for measuring characteristics of a sample liquid, in particular viscoelastic characteristics of a blood sample"

This is the single most dangerous reference. Verified by direct retrieval of its text. It discloses:

• a support member having at least one upper bearing arm with an upper bearing unit, at least one lower bearing arm with a lower bearing unit, and a base for attachment to a measuring system;
• a shaft rotatably supported about a rotation axis by the upper and lower bearing units, where "said upper bearing unit, said lower bearing unit and said shaft toes form toe bearings";
• an interface member carrying a detecting element (e.g., a mirror) and a drive element (e.g., a spring wire);
• thrust plate 47 and movable plate 46 each comprise a dimple, the dimple aligning the shaft — i.e., a descried point-contact load-bearing interface; and
• an adjusting means 17 "adjusted for a predefined pretension."

Reliability: very high — I retrieved the specification text directly.

Teaches, and why it matters: (a) a two-arm support structure holding a rotatable shaft in a viscoelastic blood analyzer — i.e., the native implementation of F1; (b) point contact (shaft toe seated in a dimple, the dimple being the load transfer point) — i.e., F6; (c) adjustment means for setting/altering the bearing relationship at assembly — a direct on-point analog of F2; (d) mirror-based optical readout — F10.

I would expect this reference to be the primary reference in any § 103 rejection of claim 1 and to be anticipatory or near-anticipatory of claim 5/8's point-contact feature.

2.4 Art cited in the field's ISR tables (indicative, not certified for this patent)

The ISR tables I retrieved for adjacent applications list the following as X/Y art in viscoelastic-fluid measurement and related support/bearing structures:

• US 4,896,995 A (Boisseau, P. et al., 1990-01-30) — X-cited.
• US 2007/0286454 A1 (Green, R.B. et al., 2007-12-27) — X-cited.
• US 2008/0286822 A1 (Gallager, S., 2008-11-20) — Y-cited.
• US 4,603,977 A (Bennett, J.L. et al., 1986-08-05) — Y-cited (bearing/mount structure).
• US 5,312,731 A (Engström, G., 1994-05-17) — Y-cited.
• US 4,901,194 A (Steinman, A.J. et al., 1990-02-13) — X-cited; this one is notable because it appears in the applicant's own information disclosure trail for the sibling family ("cited in the application").
• US 2016/0051713 A1 (Robert, M.E., 2016-02-25) — X-cited.
• US 8,861,166 B2 (Illinois Tool Works, 2014-10-14) — "cited in the application."

Reliability: moderate. I verified these citations exist in ISR tables, but those tables belong to other applications. Their dates all predate 2016-04-29, so they are statutorily available; but their substantive teaching should be confirmed from primary copies before use. I flag US 4,901,194 as the one most likely to be genuinely on-point for this family given it is marked "cited in the application" in the sibling disclosure.

2.5 General mechanical art — the pivot/unload/lock body of knowledge

This is not a single reference but the reservoir a POSITA is charged with knowing:

• Jewel bearings with tapered/conical grooves mating a hardened cone or pivot — the canonical low-friction, low-torque suspension in watches, galvanometers, compasses, and moving-coil instruments. Century-old art.
• Magnetic bearings / magnetically unloaded pivots — using like-pole repulsion (or attraction across a gap) to off-load a thrust or pivot contact to reduce friction and wear. Standard in instrument and rotor design.
• Releasable clamps, set screws, latch structures, and friction (roughness) interfaces for locking an adjustable azimuth/elevation joint, such as in optical mounts and kinematic benches.
• Optical shaft-encoder readout via reflective patch + emitter + photodetector, and light pipes/light guides to control beam divergence in machined bores.

Every one of these is squarely within the POSITA's presumed ken and, critically, the patent itself treats them as such — the specification expressly says the enumerated stop-mechanism options are "just a few examples... but are not exhaustive."

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3. Combination analyses

Combination A — Claim 1 (and claims 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 10, 11, 12, 14): Hartert TEG + Calatzis/ROTEM shaft-and-bearing support + US 8,383,045 arm-type support with adjustment means + conventional releasable clamp ("rotatable structure + stop mechanism")

Mapping.

Motivation to combine (the crux). A POSITA has a concrete, articulated reason:

1. The problem is inherent and known. In a TEG-type instrument the pin/shaft must be coaxial with the cup, and any residual angular/azimuthal offset is not just cosmetic — it produces a baseline offset and phase error in the thromboelastogram, directly corrupting the amplitude (MA) and the early-trace kinetics that clinicians rely on. Alignment/zeroing of a measuring axis is one of the oldest problems in instrument design.
2. The known cure was to build adjustment into the mount. US 8,383,045 already provides "adjusting means" at the bearing support and a "predefined pretension"; the claim's stop mechanism is the same idea with a selectable lock and release. Combining a known adjustable mount (8,383,045) with a known torque-driven suspended shaft (Hartert/ROTEM) to give the assembler a one-time calibration degree of freedom that can be locked is the paradigmatic "use of a known technique to improve a similar device in the same way" (§ 2143 rationale C).
3. Reasonable expectation of success. The combination adds one slow, low-load, hand-set rotational degree of freedom to a support whose only job is to hold a pivot. There is no interoperability risk, no change to the measurement principle, and the kinematics are elementary. The artisan would expect it to work on the first try.
4. Enumerated design incentives. The patent's own stated rationale — eliminate angular offset to improve accuracy — is exactly the incentive a POSITA would have had, and it is a quality/yield incentive (fewer misaligned instruments, better inter-instrument reproducibility), which is the kind of market force KSR treats as supplying motivation.

Counterargument to anticipate, and the rebuttal. The applicant will argue that prior-art supports were passive (torsion wire or fixed ball bearing) and that the invention's insight was to make part of the support itself the adjustment element. Rebuttal: (a) that is a location change, not a functional one — the clamp's physical placement on the base versus on the arm is a matter of ordinary mechanical choice; (b) US 8,383,045 already puts the bearing in an arm with an adjusting means, so the "location" is not even new; and (c) the claim is expressed in purely functional terms ("a stop mechanism ... used for applying a stop force"), which reads on any set screw or friction pad.

Strength assessment: claim 1 → strong-to-moderate obviousness. Strong on the combination rationale; moderate only because I have not located a single reference that identically pre-figures the rotatable-structure/support-base/stop-mechanism triad as a unit. That is the claim's real survival zone, and it is narrow.

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Combination B — Claims 5 and 8 (point contact; jewel bearing + tapered groove + top cone): US 8,383,045 (toe bearing in a dimple) + jewel-bearing/cone pivot art + ROTEM mirror readout

Why obvious. US 8,383,045 already teaches a shaft toe resting in a dimple — that is a point contact, and it is the load-bearing interface. The claim's added limitations over that disclosure are (i) naming the contact "point contact," (ii) specifying a jewel bearing with a tapered groove, and (iii) mating it to a top cone, with an example contact area of 0.8 mm².

Rationale — substitution of a known element for another known element to obtain a predictable result (§ 2143 rationale B). Jewel-and-cone pivots are the standard low-torque suspension in instruments where stiction would swamp the measured signal. A POSITA facing the recognized problem that bearing friction and stick-slip corrupt the low-torque TEG trace has an off-the-shelf solution: replace a ball bearing (Calatzis) or a plain toe-and-dimple (8,383,045) with a hardened cone seated in a jewel groove. The functional role — carry the axial load at a single small-area contact while permitting near-frictionless rotation — is identical, and the result (lower friction) is precisely what one expects. The "0.8 mm²" figure is a result-effective-parameter-in-optimization situation at best; absent a showing that the claimed range is critical and produces unexpected results, optimizing contact-tip area is routine.

Anticipation consideration. If US 8,383,045's dimple + toe is treated as "point contact," then claims 5/8 are close to anticipated, with the jewel material being a mere substitution. Note also the applicant's own family strategy: the Haemonetics continuations (US 11,835,512; US 12,169,195) migrated to claims reciting "the downward/upward point contact being the only point contact between the fixed support part and the movable support part." That is an implicit admission that the bare "point contact" concept — the subject of claims 5/8 here — was not a comfortable position, and that the family had to add the "only point contact" negative limitation to secure allowance in the later cases. That is a powerful secondary indicator of obviousness for these claims.

Strength assessment: claims 5, 8 → strong.

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Combination C — Claim 9 (pair of magnets, like poles facing): Combination A or B + magnetic-unloading art

Why obvious. The claim's declared function (per the specification's own "beneficial effects" § 4) is that "the magnet on the first support part applies an upward magnetic force to the magnet on the second support part," and "[t]he magnetic force can reduce the pressure of the point contact... and further reduce the frictional force generated by the point contact."

That is a textbook magnetically unloaded pivot — a standard technique for reducing friction and wear at a thrust/pivot interface by cancelling part of the normal load with a repulsive magnetic field. The POSITA has both the motivation (friction is the recognized dominant error source in low-torque TEG; and friction/wear at the point contact is a known durability issue) and a reasonable expectation of success (the physics — repulsion across a like-pole gap reduces normal force, hence Coulomb friction — is elementary and quantitatively predictable by F = μN).

Formulation matters. The patent frames the magnet pair as fixed to the first and second support parts with like poles facing. If the rejection uses a generic magnetic-bearing reference that unloads a rotor relative to a stator, the applicant's only remaining argument is that the magnets are mounted on the support parts rather than the shaft — a placement difference with no functional consequence, and therefore an obvious variation. Note also that the two-magnet design here is an unbalanced pair (both surfaces at the same pole across a gap), so the claim does not even capture the more sophisticated balanced magnetic suspension — it captures the simplest possible repulsive arrangement.

Strength assessment: claim 9 → strong, contingent on locating a magnetic-unloading reference in a comparable low-force instrument context (very likely; I did not complete that search).

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Combination D — Claims 11, 12, 13 (measurement device; reflective sheet + light emitting module + light receiving module + processing module; LED + light guide column; photocell + light guide column): Calatzis/ROTEM + conventional optoelectronics + light-pipe art

Why obvious — and why this is the weakest claim group.

The specification's stated problem — that a machined bore of "certain roughness" will diffusely reflect and waste light — is a known, routine optical packaging problem with a known, routine answer. Applying a light guide to a known mirror/LED/photocell readout is the "application of a known technique to a known device ready for improvement." Under KSR, that is not an inventive step.

Strength assessment: claims 11, 12 → strong; claim 13 → strong (light-guide-as-light-channel is about as close to a per-se obvious expedient as one finds in a mechanical patent).

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Combination E — Claim 15 (use method): any of the above + routine calibration and test procedure

The method steps are: (1) release the stop force when the first support part is offset from a predetermined position; (2) apply manual force to re-phase the bridge structure to a predetermined angle; (3) insert the shaft into blood; (4) rotate the blood; (5) compute coagulation data from the measured angle.

Steps 2–5 are, respectively: an alignment/zeroing calibration step (universal in instrument setup, and the patent itself states the target is simply that "the axis of the bridge structure in a length direction is perpendicular to the plane of the second support part" — a trivial geometric target), and the unchanged, centuries-old TEG measurement protocol. Where the apparatus of claims 1–14 is obvious, the method of using it by (i) calibrating it and then (ii) performing the instrument's normal function is obvious as a matter of course. A method claim cannot be saved by the novelty of the apparatus it operates on when the method steps themselves are the conventional operation of that apparatus plus calibration. Strength: strong.

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4. What is not easily obvious — and the honest limits of this analysis

I would be doing the client a disservice by presenting this as a clean sweep. The defensible residues are:

1. The F2 triad as a unit. No reference I retrieved discloses, in a single viscoelastic-measurement support, a first support part internally divided into a rotatable structure, a support base, and a stop mechanism whose release lets the rotatable structure — while still rotatably carrying the second support part — be re-phased relative to the base. US 8,383,045's "adjusting means for a predefined pretension" is the nearest thing and is not the same: pretension adjustment is a load-setting function, not an azimuth/phase-setting function. Expect the applicant to press this distinction hard. Combination A is therefore a "strong rationale, moderate teaching" rejection — cleanly makeable, but it will require a second reference or a declaration-style rationale to fully bridge the gap.
2. The two-degree-of-freedom-with-selective-lock architecture. The claim's structural elegance is that one body rotates relative to two different bodies on two different axes, with a lock on only one of them. That is a genuinely specific kinematic arrangement, and the closest prior art is a generic adjustable mount. A rejection should therefore be built carefully (primary reference + articulated reasoning + optional third reference) rather than asserted in one sentence.
3. No secondary-considerations evidence exists in the record to help either side. The specification reports no comparative data, no unexpected-results showing, no long-felt-need narrative with dates, and no commercial-success evidence tied to the claimed feature. If the patent owner later proffers commercial success through the Haemonetics TEG line, the nexus question is live (the assignment to Haemonetics was recorded 2022-04-06, after grant), but nothing in the supplied record supports a nexus today.

Things I could not verify, and will not assert:

• The exact granted claim text and independent-claim numbering for US 11,067,490. I built this analysis from the aspect/claim framework and the granted-claim fragments retrievable in this session. The earlier section already recorded this as provisional, and that caveat stands. Verify against USPTO PatentCenter for application 16/097,016 before filing anything.
• Primary copies of the ISR-cited references in § 2.4, and the precise claim-charting of each. The ISR tables I retrieved belonged to adjacent applications.
• Primary copies of Hartert US 3,714,815 / US 4,148,216 and Calatzis US 5,777,215. The Hartert/Calatzis substance is corroborated by multiple independent field sources retrieved; the specific US numbers come from secondary literature and must be checked.
• The assignee of US 8,383,045. I did not confirm it; it sits in the Calatzis/ROTEM lineage, which is why I have reasoned about it as viscoelastic-field art rather than as a specific party's property.

Consistency check against the earlier sections. No contradiction arises. The earlier sections found no litigation and no AIA proceedings against 11,067,490; the claim set is therefore untested both in court and at the Board. That matters for § 103 strategy in one specific way: there is no prior claim construction and no FWD findings on the art to narrow the field, so the artisan-level and motivation analysis above is being made on a blank slate. It also means any IPR petition on this patent would be a § 102/§ 103-only exercise (the PGR window closed; the patent issued 2021-07-20), so the references in § 2 must be patents or printed publications — which all of them are.

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5. Bottom line

The patent's center of gravity is claim 1's F2 triad, and that is the only place where a competent § 103 challenge needs real work. Everything downstream — point contact, jewel-and-cone, magnets, optical readout, light guides, and the method — reads on known solutions to known problems in the same field, combined for predictable results, and would be vulnerable under KSR rationale (B) (substitution of a known element), (C) (known technique to improve a similar device in the same way), and (F) (design incentive / market force). Conversely, the narrowness of claim 1's remaining gap, combined with the family's migration toward "the only point contact" language in the Haemonetics continuations, suggests the applicant itself did not regard the rotatable/stop-mechanism concept as the family's strongest asset.