US 11402415

I'll search for this specific patent and any related litigation.

The CAFC search returned no results. Let me check for any litigation or court dockets involving this patent or its owner.

US 11,402,415 B2 — Verified Summary

Search note on scope: I searched for USPTO records and for any Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) 2026 docket activity tied to this patent number. No CAFC 2026 docket, appeal, or litigation proceeding for US 11,402,415 was found in the results returned. Searches for "Streamlinx" litigation and for the patent number combined with "Federal Circuit / CAFC 2026" returned no relevant hits. I therefore cannot confirm any Federal Circuit activity, and I flag that as a genuine gap rather than a conclusion that none exists — absence of search results is not proof of absence.

Bibliographic data (from the authoritative patent text and corroborating USPTO-derived sources)

Abstract (verbatim): "A method and system for providing energy audits including installation, verification and inspection of energy consuming components and energy producing components. An energy audit is conducted offline on an energy audit application on a network device for energy consuming components (e.g., lighting, heating, ventilation, air condition, etc.) and energy producing components (e.g., solar, wind, water, etc.) and automatically synchronized to a server network device when the network device is able to connect to a communications network and go on-line. Energy audit templates are provided to ensure all energy consuming components and energy producing components are fully defined and consistently identified on an electronic floorplan for a commercial or industrial building."

Sources: https://patents.google.com/patent/US11402415/en ; https://patents.justia.com/patent/[11402415](/patent/11402415) ; https://www.patents-review.com/a/20220113690-method-system-providing-energy-audits.html

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Independent claims — plain-language overview

Note on numbering/uncertainty: The record shows three independent claims — claim 1 (method), claim 22 (non-transitory computer readable medium), and claim 23 (system) — with claims 22 and 23 containing substantially parallel limitations to claim 1. I rate the substance below as high confidence; the precise claim-number-to-claim-type mapping is medium confidence because my sources present the claim text in excerpted form. Dependent claim 18 (which Recites wireless communications interfaces) is confirmed to depend from claim 1.

Claim 1 — Method (independent). A computer-implemented energy-audit method in which:

• an electronic floorplan of a building and a dynamically configurable electronic template are provided on an energy-audit application running on a mobile network device;
• a template wizard asks the auditor questions and automatically adds new data fields to the template mid-audit (e.g., adding a lumen field for fluorescent fixtures, then new fields when storerooms with incandescent lights are encountered);
• a creation component lets the auditor place graphical markers for energy-consuming components at specific locations on the floorplan and change their colors as progress indicators — a first color (nothing collected yet), a second color (collection complete), and a third color (a problem/issue requiring further action);
• the device is moved to locations inside the building where concrete/steel blocks network connectivity, so the device is designated "offline" and does not connect, which prevents constant connection retries and preserves battery power; the offline physical locations still map to virtual locations on the floorplan so data can be synced later;
• the auditor captures audio (voice memos), visual (camera/still pictures/video, optionally 360-degree), and electronic (keyboard entry) information for each component, stored in the template;
• those steps are repeated across many components; a dynamically updated energy audit summary report is generated on the device;
• when the device is later moved to a location with connectivity (inside or outside the building), it automatically connects to a server energy-audit application and automatically synchronizes the data so the audit information on the device and the server are identical.

Claim 22 — Non-transitory computer readable medium (independent). A CRM storing instructions that perform substantially the same steps as claim 1 — providing the electronic floorplan and configurable template; the two-stage device movement (first locations where the device is online, then selected second locations inside the building where building materials prevent connection and the device is designated offline, with the offline locations still mapped to the floorplan for later synchronization); creating and coloring graphical markers; the template wizard question/answer flow that dynamically adds fields; collecting audio/visual/electronic information; storing it; repeating across components; creating the dynamically updated summary report; reconnecting to the server; and automatically synchronizing.

Claim 23 — System (independent). A system comprising plural network devices and one or more server network devices with processors and non-transitory computer readable media, a communications network, and components configured to carry out the same functional steps as claim 1/claim 22 — including the electronic floorplan, the template wizard that presents questions to create new data fields in the configurable electronic template, the three-color graphical markers, offline operation inside the building, data collection, and automatic synchronization with the server application.

Other notable points in the disclosure (context, not claim scope)

• The specification describes energy-consuming components as including lighting, heating, ventilation, air conditioning, motors, variable frequency drives, transformers, and generators, and energy-producing components as solar, wind, water (hydroelectric), and biomass.
• Additional sensing components (laser/LIDAR distance meters, GPS, electric meters, lumen meters, airflow meters, water-flow meters, pressure meters, thermometers) may supplement the captured data.
• The specification describes optional AI methods (predictive analysis, anomaly detection, clustering) used with or without Big Data, both on the device and on the server application, and reports/links with product and pricing information for replacement components. The patent expressly states the invention may be practiced without AI.
• Related filings in the same family (per the Google Patents family data): US 17/172,957 → US 11,676,106 B2; US 17/865,485 → US 12,265,937 B2; US 18/208,763 → US 12,307,398 B2; US 19/211,806 → US 2025/0278685 A1.

What I could not verify

• No CAFC 2026 docket or appeal for US 11,402,415 (or for Streamlinx) appeared in any search result; treat this as unconfirmed rather than as evidence that no such proceeding exists.
• I did not retrieve a certified USPTO Patent Center/Patent Public Search record directly; the bibliographic data above is from the authoritative patent text supplied plus USPTO-derived mirrors (Google Patents, Justia, Patents-Review), which agree with one another. If you need a certified claim set (e.g., for claim-charting or an invalidity analysis), pull the official USPTO full-text and any certificate of correction, since issued claims can differ from the US 2022/0113690 A1 pre-grant version (the granted claim 1 appears to have been narrowed during prosecution by adding the offline-designation, template-wizard, and three-color-marker limitations).

I'll search for litigation involving US patent 11402415 across patent litigation databases.

Let me try more targeted searches on litigation-specific databases.

Let me try a few more targeted searches to be thorough.

Litigation Search Results: US Patent No. 11,402,415

Bottom line: I found no record of any litigation involving US Patent No. 11,402,415. The searches did not surface any district court action, ITC investigation, PTAB proceeding, or Federal Circuit appeal naming this patent. On the available evidence, no known litigation has been filed asserting (or challenging) this patent as of the search date.

Because you asked me not to fabricate, I want to be explicit about what I did and did not find rather than padding the answer with a case list.

What I searched

• General web queries for "US patent 11402415 litigation" and "11402415" patent lawsuit
• Queries combining the patent with its owner, Streamlinx LLC, and assignee-related terms
• Queries aimed at Unified Patents' litigation portal, PACER/CAFC-style sources, and docket aggregators (Docket Alarm, courtlistener-style indexes)
• Streamlinx-focused infringement/defendant queries

What the results actually contained

• Patent bibliographic data only. Google Patents, patents-review.com, and a wiki mirror confirm US 11,402,415 B2, "Method and system for providing energy audits," Streamlinx LLC (Naperville, IL), inventors Michael J., Rodney J., and Jeffrey A. Seifert, filed 2020-10-14, granted 2022-08-02. None of these pages show a "Litigation" section or listed cases.
• Related-family/continuation patents, not litigation. Search results referenced Streamlinx's related patents — e.g., US 11,676,106 B2 and US 12,265,937 B2 ("...with plural auditors") — but these are prosecution/assignment links, not lawsuits involving the '415 patent.
• Unrelated filings with coincidental hits. Unified Patents PTAB petitions and the "11402415" string appeared in search hits only because of (a) other numbering, (b) a UK Companies House gazette entry (company number, not the patent), and (c) unrelated litigations. These do not involve US 11,402,415, and I am deliberately excluding them per your instruction not to return results for similar/unrelated numbers.

Important caveats (please verify independently)

1. Search-tool limits. My queries hit a maximum-step cutoff before I could exhaust specialized databases (Unified Patents portal case list, Docket Alarm, CourtListener, PACER). I cannot claim the searches were exhaustive.
2. Possibility of litigation I did not see. Streamlinx is a small, relatively recent patent owner (assertion activity would post-date the 2022 grant). It is entirely possible that a complaint exists but is not indexed by the free sources reachable here, or that a suit was filed after the coverage window of the sources returned.
3. No negatives from authoritative registries. I did not obtain a clean "no cases" confirmation directly from PACER, the Unified Patents litigation portal, or the CAFC docket — only the absence of hits in search results.

Recommended next steps to confirm

• Query the Unified Patents litigation portal (https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/litigation/caselist) by patent number 11,402,415 — I was unable to retrieve a case-list page for this number.
• Search PACER / Docket Alarm / CourtListener for "11,402,415" and for assignee Streamlinx LLC as plaintiff.
• Check the USPTO Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) and USPTO Assignment records for any IPR/PGR or assignment activity tied to the '415 patent.
• Search the Federal Circuit docket for any appeal originating from a case involving this patent.

If you can run those targeted lookups and share the outputs, I can analyze and format any resulting cases with plaintiff, defendant, jurisdiction, case number, filing date, and status. Based strictly on what I could retrieve, however, the honest answer is: no litigation is known for US Patent No. 11,402,415.

I'll verify the structured data against live sources before drafting.

Proceedings overview

Total AIA trial proceedings on US 11402415: 0. The USPTO Open Data Portal (ODP) structured "PTAB proceedings on file" block supplied with this task returns no AIA trial proceedings, and my targeted web searches (PTAB petition documents at ptacts.uspto.gov, Unified Patents' patent portal, and general IPR/PGR/CBM queries pairing "11402415" and "Streamlinx") surfaced no IPR, PGR, or CBM involving this patent — only unrelated proceedings on other patents (e.g., IPR2022-00211 on U.S. 7,783,788; an Ozmo Licensing Fintiv discussion re the '991 patent). There is no proceeding to profile below. The bottom-line defensive posture is therefore not "the patent has survived IPRs and is hardened," but rather "the patent has never been tested at the PTAB" — the claims are entirely untested, not validated, and no § 315(e)(2) estoppel has been earned by anyone.

Confidence and caveats (stated plainly, per the no-fabrication rule):

• I could not independently confirm via PTAB E2E / PTAB Decisions search or a CourtListener docket search within this session's tool budget. The ODP block is the canonical source and says zero, so I default to zero — but treat "zero" as reported, not audited.
• No PTAB proceeding number exists, so I am not inventing one. There is no petitioner, no panel, no institution decision, no FWD, no settlement, and no Federal Circuit appeal to report.

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No proceedings on file

There are no entries to render in the per-proceeding format. I have deliberately left the proceeding templates empty rather than populate fields I cannot ground.

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Strategic summary

Claim status: entirely UNTESTED. No claim of US 11402415 has been canceled, confirmed, or even subjected to an institution decision by the PTAB. I do not have the issued claim text in the material supplied, so I will not paraphrase claim numbers or scope — the authoritative claim set is at https://patents.google.com/patent/US11402415/en. For a defendant, this cuts both ways: there is no inter partes record narrowing the claims and binding the patent owner under § 315(e)(1)/§ 325(e)(1) (patent-owner estoppel), but there is also no cheap "IPR already killed claim 1" shortcut. Any invalidity theory must be built from scratch and would have to survive the patent owner's first full-thickness defense of the claims.

Estoppel landscape: empty. With no petitioner, no § 315(e)(2) estoppel attaches to anyone. There is no privity chain, no RPI declaration, and no defensive aggregator (Unified Patents or similar) appearing in any record I could find on this patent. That means, for a defendant now threatened or sued, the full universe of prior-art grounds remains available for an IPR/PGR petition or for district-court invalidity — nothing is spent.

Pattern signals: two, both pointing away from PTAB activity.

1. Prosecution, not enforcement. Streamlinx has been actively continuation-filing on this family rather than litigating it. The ODP record shows priority continuations to US 17/172,957 (→ US11676106B2), US 17/865,485 (→ US12265937B2), US 18/208,763 (→ US12307398B2), and US 19/211,806 (→ US20250278685A1). A family with five-plus members issued between 2022 and 2025 is a family that has not yet been hit, which strongly correlates with low assertion activity to date.
2. Patent age. Filing/priority date 2020-10-14, grant 2022-08-02. IPR petitions are overwhelmingly filed within the § 315(b) one-year window after service of a first infringement complaint. A 2022 patent with no IPR most likely means no complaint was served on a sophisticated defendant during that window — i.e., the patent has not been meaningfully asserted, or only recently so. Note the absence of IPRs can also be an artifact of ODP ingest lag; see caveat below.

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Recommended next steps

If you are a defendant:

1. Establish the § 315(b) clock immediately. Determine the date you (or a real party in interest / privy) were served with a complaint alleging infringement of US 11402415, or of a family member whose claims you also practice. Your IPR petition deadline is one year from that service date (35 U.S.C. § 315(b)). Because family members share the same specification and overlapping claim scope, confirm whether the patent owner has asserted both 11402415 and a continuation — a single petition strategy may cover the family.
2. File the IPR early. Since there is no prior petitioner, no estoppel, and no IPR to piggyback on, the first movant gets to define the art and the record. Given the claim set is drawn to software/business-method-flavored workflow (offline data collection on a mobile app against an electronic floorplan, dynamic templating, marker coloring, automatic cloud re-synchronization), prior art should be readily available in the 2010–2020 facilities-management, BIM/CAD, and mobile field-service space. Note that the G06Q50/06 and G06Q10/087 classifications and the Y04S50/16 cross-reference signal subject matter that has historically been vulnerable to § 103 combinations.
3. Do not rely on "no IPRs" as a merits statement. It is a procedural observation, not evidence of validity. The claims are untested, and the patent owner has never had to defend them.

If you are the patent owner:

1. The clean PTAB record is a genuine asset — the claims stand unreviewed. Preserve that by considering ex parte reexamination strategy only after consulting counsel (it would create a prosecution record and could complicate litigation).
2. Anticipate that first assertion will trigger a § 315(b)-clock IPR within 12 months. Consider whether any family member's claims are more robust than 11402415's before asserting broadly.

Verification steps I could not complete (do these before relying on the zero count):

• Search PTAB E2E / PTAB Decisions (https://developer.uspto.gov / https://ptacts.uspto.gov) by application number 17/070,720 and by patent number 11402415, and repeat for family members 17/172,957, 17/865,485, 18/208,763, and 19/211,806.
• Search District Court dockets (CourtListener RECAP: https://www.courtlistener.com) for "Streamlinx" as plaintiff to date any § 315(b) trigger and to identify co-defendants who might have filed a first petition.
• Re-check Unified Patents' patent portal for US11402415, since a defensive-aggregator filing is the most common source of a first IPR on a low-profile NPE-style patent.

Bottom line: No PTAB activity exists on US 11402415 as of this analysis. There are no claim-level outcomes to quote, no FWD to link, and no estoppel to leverage or fear. The patent is untested, not hardened — and the most valuable defensive information for a defendant right now is not a PTAB record, but the date on which the § 315(b) one-year clock started ticking.

I'll research the assignment record and ownership chain for this patent. Let me run several searches in parallel.

The first searches returned mostly noise. Let me dig specifically at Google Patents legal events and assignment records.

Ownership & Assignment Analysis — US 11,402,415 B2

Access caveat up front (please read before relying on the timeline): I could not complete a live query of the USPTO Assignment Center (assignmentcenter.uspto.gov / the indexed assignment.uspto.gov mirror) in this session — the assignment-record searches returned no usable record data, and I hit the tool-call limit before I could retrieve a reel/frame. I have no verified reel/frame numbers for this patent. Everything below is reconstructed from the authoritative patent text supplied, the family front pages on Google Patents / Justia, and public company data — not from a certified assignment extract. Treat the "Assignment timeline" section as a gap, not a negative finding, and re-pull the record directly before using this for standing or chain-of-title work.

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Inventors

• All three share the Seifert surname and two residences cluster in Northeast Ohio while the assignee's HQ is Naperville, IL — consistent with a small family-controlled enterprise rather than a corporate R&D department. This is a naming/geography observation only, not proof of employment.
• Employer determination is inferential, not documentary. What I can ground: on the family member US 11,676,106 B2 (app. 17/172,957, a CIP of this patent's 17/070,720), the same three Seiferts are listed as applicants at box (71) and StreamLinx LLC appears at box (73) as assignee — i.e., the inventors and the company are the same interest group, with the company obtaining the assignment. I did not find a separate employment agreement, an inventor declaration, or an SEC filing confirming employment.
• No departure / fire-sale precursor pattern. The opposite: the same three inventors recur across the entire family filed over roughly five years — US 11,676,106 (filed 2021-02-10), US 12,265,937 (granted 2025-04-01), US 12,307,398, and US 2025/0278685 A1. Inventor continuity across a 2020→2025 family is the inverse of the "all inventors departed within 12 months" signal. Signal not present.

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Original assignee

• Entity named on the issued patent: StreamLinx LLC, Naperville, Illinois (387 Shuman Blvd., Suite 205W, Naperville, IL 60563 per CB Insights).
• Primary line of business: Energy-efficiency / lighting-retrofit software. Its flagship product is SnapCount, a tablet/industrial-grade platform used by energy service companies (ESCOs) and lighting contractors to "assess, quote and mobilize comprehensive energy retrofit projects" — i.e., to collect fixture, location and condition data in the field with photos, videos and floorplans, and to enable collaboration/secondary review of audits. This is a direct commercial embodiment of the claim-1 subject matter (offline field data capture on a mobile device tied to an electronic floorplan, with audio/visual/electronic collection and later synchronization).
• Founded: 2010. Status: appears operating as of the evidence retrieved. NAESCO member-news coverage (July 2017) documents SnapCount in commercial use and a partnership with Encentiv Energy; a NAESCO-hosted case study documents deployment at Rogers Electric (reported 30% audit error reduction, 3× throughput). StreamLinx has filed 4 patents (CB Insights).
• No evidence of: acquisition, dissolution, Chapter 7/11, or an IP-only restructuring. No 10-K/8-K exists to check because StreamLinx is private — so this is absence of evidence, not verified solvency.

Naming-collision warning (do not conflate). A USPTO assignment cover sheet surfaced in search under reel 040717/0948 (recorded 2016-12-13, executed 2016-12-07) transferring patents from "STREAMLINE, INC." (a Minnesota corporation, Minneapolis) to SKYTRON, LLC (Grand Rapids, MI), covering medical-device patents such as 7,497,407 (transformable intravenous pole). Correspondent there: Warner Norcross & Judd LLP, submitter Chad E. Kleinheksel. That is an unrelated medical-equipment company and is not part of this chain. Flagging it because a bare string search for "Streamline + assignment" will surface it and it is an easy false positive.

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Assignment timeline

I am not able to produce a verified, reel/frame-grounded timeline for this patent.

• No recorded post-issuance assignment is evidenced. Google Patents lists both the Original Assignee and the Current Assignee as Streamlinx LLC (with Google's standard disclaimer that its assignee data "may be inaccurate"). The family member US 11,676,106 B2 likewise shows Assignee: StreamLinx LLC, Naperville, IL. There is no recorded transfer to a holding/licensing entity, no security interest, no merger, no release, and no change-of-name event appearing in any source I retrieved.
• The only likely-recorded link is the original inventor→company assignment (the three Seiferts → StreamLinx LLC, executed on or about the 2020-10-14 filing). I could not retrieve its reel/frame, execution date, or recording date. Stating one would be fabrication.
• Correspondent of record for the assignment recording: not retrieved. What I can state with a citation is the prosecution attorney of record — Lesavich High-Tech Law Group, S.C. (Stephen Lesavich), named as attorney/agent on US 11,676,106 B2. The prosecuting firm is not necessarily the firm that filed the assignment cover sheet, so I do not treat this as the recorded assignment correspondent. It appears once in what I retrieved; a single appearance is not a recurrence finding, so I am not raising it as an NPE signal.

Stopping here per the instruction: where the Assignment Center yields no usable record, the honest output is the statement above. The correct next step is a direct pull at https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html (search property 11,402,415) and at https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/, which will return the reel/frame, conveyance type, and the filing correspondent that this analysis is missing.

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Timeline diagram

Rendered from what is documented (filing, issue dates, family) rather than from unverified assignment data. I have deliberately omitted the assigned-to-StreamLinx step's date because I could not confirm it.

timeline
    title Ownership of US 11402415
    2020 : Filed by the three Seifert inventors
    2020 : Assigned to StreamLinx LLC Naperville
    2022 : Patent US 11402415 issued
    2023 : Family member US 11676106 issued
    2025 : Family member US 12265937 issued
    2025 : Family member US 12307398 issued

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NPE / troll-pattern signals

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Verdict

Insufficient data.

Justification (2–3 sentences): The chain of title appears to consist of a single recorded assignment — the three Seifert inventors to StreamLinx LLC around the 2020-10-14 filing — with the same operating entity still shown as both Original and Current Assignee and no post-issuance transfer, security interest, or change of name evidenced anywhere I could retrieve; because I could not pull a reel/frame, execution date, or filing correspondent from the Assignment Center, I cannot certify the record and therefore fall to the lowest-confidence verdict rather than assert a negative. Substantively, zero of the eight NPE signals are present, and the affirmative evidence points the other way: the assignee is a private operating software vendor (SnapCount, founded 2010, Naperville IL) whose shipped product tracks the claims, the same three inventors persist across the 2020→2025 family, and no litigation or assertion activity was found. Any "shell"/"troll" characterization of StreamLinx would be unsupported — the entity name carries no "IP/Licensing" suffix and there is no concrete evidence of a licensing-only, no-products, single-purpose vehicle.

Verification links:

• USPTO Assignment Search (pull reel/frame, conveyance, correspondent): https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html
• USPTO Assignment Center: https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/
• Google Patents legal events / assignee: https://patents.google.com/patent/US11402415/en
• Family member front page (assignee + inventors-as-applicants + prosecuting firm): https://patents.google.com/patent/[US11676106B2](/patent/US11676106B2)/en
• Company profile (products, HQ, founding year): https://www.cbinsights.com/company/streamlinx
• Unrelated-entity false positive to exclude (Streamline, Inc. → Skytron, LLC): http://legacy-assignments.uspto.gov/assignments/assignment-pat-040717-0948.pdf

Residual gaps I could not close: (1) reel/frame + recording correspondent for the original assignment; (2) whether a security interest or IP-lending lien (common for a small private software company) was ever recorded and released; (3) StreamLinx's current corporate status, which I inferred from incidental 2017-era trade-association material rather than a current registry pull.

I'll research the prior-art citations on the face of US 11,402,415 and in its prosecution history.

I need the actual "References Cited" (front-page citations) and prosecution citations. Let me search targeted sources.

I have a partial front-page citation list. Let me get the complete list including foreign documents and non-patent literature.

I hit the tool call limit, so I'll answer with what I was able to retrieve, flagging clearly what is verified versus what I could not pull.

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Scope, method, and honest limits on this deliverable

What you asked for: identify the most relevant prior art for US 11,402,415 by walking each patent citation on the patent, with full citation, publication/filing date, brief description, and the claim(s) each reference potentially anticipates under 35 U.S.C. § 102.

What I could retrieve: the front-page "References Cited — U.S. Patent Documents" list as mirrored on Justia's page for this exact patent — https://patents.justia.com/patent/11402415 — plus one cited reference's full text (US 8,285,603, from the patentimages PDF), and one more cited reference's bibliographic data (US 8,492,922, from Google Patents). The Justia list returned truncated — it cut off at US 2011/0208710 among the published applications.

What I could NOT retrieve (and therefore do not represent as complete):

• The foreign patent documents column of the front page (if any).
• The "Other Publications" / non-patent literature cited by the examiner.
• The full published-applications list (truncated).
• The prosecution-history citations (Form PTO/SB/08a IDS submissions and office-action citations) from the file wrapper — these often contain art not printed on the face of the patent.

So the list below is the front-page U.S. patent documents, as retrieved, and is incomplete. I am not going to pad it with plausible-looking numbers.

I also want to flag a common confusion I deliberately avoided: Google Patents' "Cited By (49)" table is forward citation (later patents citing the '415) — it is not prior art against the '415. Search results surfaced that table prominently; I have excluded it.

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A. Front-page "References Cited — U.S. Patent Documents" (as retrieved)

(Later applications in the 2011/2013+ series, any foreign documents, and all non-patent literature were not returned and are missing from this table.)

Source for the citation list: https://patents.justia.com/patent/11402415 ("Referenced Cited"). Source for US 8,285,603 text: http://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/da/f0/ae/02a7357e172dbb/US8285603.pdf. Source for US 8,492,922: https://patents.google.com/patent/US20130262040A1/en.

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B. § 102 analysis — the honest version

Framing matters here, and it cuts against the premise of the question. The references above are citations the examiner considered and listed on the face of the patent — they are not references that anticipated. The '415 issued over all of them (granted 2022-08-02 over a 2020-10-14 filing). Under AIA § 102, anticipation requires a single reference disclosing every limitation arranged as in the claim, and — per § 102(b)(1)/(2) and the "considered" nature of a front-page list — citation on the face is evidence of disclosure considered, not an anticipation finding. (Note the '415 is post-AIA, so AIA § 102 governs.)

The claim limitations that make § 102 hard. The issued independent claims (1, 22, 23) carry a distinctive combination, per the earlier verified summary:

• an offline designation — moving the device inside the building where concrete/steel prevent a network connection, designating the device offline to stop constant connection retries and preserve battery, while still mapping the offline physical location to a virtual location on the floorplan;
• a template wizard that asks questions mid-audit and dynamically adds data fields to the configurable template;
• three-color graphical markers as progress indicators (first color = not collected; second = collected; third = problem/action needed);
• audio + visual (camera/360°) + electronic (keyboard) capture into the template, a dynamically updated summary report, and automatic synchronization on reconnection.

No single retrieved reference discloses that whole combination. With that caveat, the most relevant references are:

1. US 8,285,603 B2 — Carlin et al. (2012-10-09). Most relevant in the same field. Discloses a server-based home-energy-audit platform with a question-driven ("Virtual") audit, energy-savings plan, product/pricing shopping list, and a registry of completed upgrades. Potentially relevant to: claims 1/22/23 only to the extent of "energy audit + report + product/pricing links"; and to the dependent claim(s) reciting electronic links to product/price and replacement-component information. Does not disclose floorplan graphical markers/colors, the offline designation, the template wizard, or audio/visual/electronic capture — so no § 102 anticipation; at most § 103 fodder.

2. US 8,495,922 B2 — Carlin, Jr. (2013-07-23). Companion "interactive internet platform for assessing and executing residential energy solutions." Same analysis; same deficiencies; § 103 candidate only.

3. US 8,095,393 (Seifert et al.) and US 9,090,203 (Seifert), and publication US 2006/0241982 (Seifert et al.). Same-inventor-family prior work. These deserve the closest scrutiny because they are the applicant's/assignee's own earlier filings in the same technical space; they could bear on the scope of the invention and on § 102(a)(1)/§ 102(b)(2) issues (including whether the "another" exception applies to commonly-owned work). Their precise disclosures are not verified in the sources I retrieved, so I will not opine on element-by-element anticipation — that would require the full texts.

4. US 8,463,765 / 9,037,564 / 9,137,250 / 9,361,479 / 9,569,771 (Lesavich et al.). A five-patent family directed to electronic-content storage/retrieval and cloud storage objects (the same cloud-storage-object architecture described in the '415 spec at FIGS. 4–5). Potentially relevant to the cloud-storage-object limitations as secondary disclosed subject matter, but they are not energy-audit references and do not disclose the audit workflow. No anticipation; background/§ 103 context only.

5. The Glunz family (9,782,936; 9,817,922; 10,867,282; 10,949,805) and the McLinden family (10,997,553; 11,030,709) — I could not verify their subject matter, so I expressly decline to assert what claims they might anticipate. Two cautions: (a) US 10,867,282 (2020-12-15) and US 10,949,805 (2021-03-16) issued after the '415 filing and are only § 102(a)(2) art if their effective filing dates precede 2020-10-14; (b) their appearance on the face suggests the examiner used them for the building/construction-modeling or analytics aspects.

6. Everything else (5,983,010; 8,805,000; 9,026,261; 9,026,405; 9,218,632; 9,863,979; 9,958,360; 10,274,916; 10,366,378; 10,956,497; and the 2004/2006 applications) — I cannot responsibly map these to claims without their text. Marking them "anticipates claim X" would be fabrication.

Net § 102 conclusion: On the record I could retrieve, no cited reference appears to anticipate any of independent claims 1, 22, or 23, because none discloses the combination of (i) the offline designation to prevent connection retries and preserve battery with virtual-location mapping, (ii) the template wizard's dynamic field addition, and (iii) the three-color marker progress scheme. The realistic invalidity theory against the '415 is § 103 (e.g., Carlin/Carlin Jr. energy-audit platform + a floorplan-annotation/mobile-data-collection reference + an offline-sync reference), not § 102.

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C. What I did NOT verify (please close these gaps before relying on this)

1. Complete front-page list — the published-application column was truncated at US 2011/0208710; the rest, plus any foreign documents and "Other Publications," are missing. Pull these from https://patents.google.com/patent/US11402415/en (Cited By / References Cited) or the USPTO Patent Public Search record.
2. Prosecution history (file wrapper) — Form PTO/SB/08a IDS entries and office-action citations. The most probative prior art in a grant-over-the-cited-art patent is usually in the file history, and I did not obtain it.
3. Element-by-element claim charts for the Seifert-family references (8,095,393; 9,090,203) and the Glunz/McLinden families — these are the references most likely to matter, and I have only their numbers.
4. No adjudicative PTAB/PACER record was located either (consistent with the earlier litigation section).

Recommended verification steps: run patent numbers 5,983,010, 8,095,393, 8,805,000, 9,026,261, 9,026,405, 9,218,632, 9,863,979, 9,958,360, 10,274,916, 10,366,378, 10,956,497, 10,997,553, 11,030,709, plus the Glunz/Lesavich families, through USPTO Patent Public Search (https://ppubs.uspto.gov), and pull the '415 file wrapper via USPTO PatentCenter. If you can supply those outputs, I can produce a proper reference-by-reference anticipation/obviousness chart with element mapping.

Bottom line: the only cited references I can characterize with confidence as relevant prior art are US 8,285,603 (Carlin) and US 8,495,922 (Carlin Jr.) — home-energy-audit platform patents — and the same-inventor Seifert-family filings. On the retrieved record, none of them (or any other cited reference) anticipates claims 1, 22, or 23 under § 102; the viable attack is § 103. I have deliberately declined to guess at the subject matter of the roughly twenty references I could not verify rather than fabricate titles, dates, or claim mappings.

I'll pull the prior-art references that Google Patents lists for this patent, then analyze obviousness.

Strong leads. Let me pin down the references actually cited on the face of the '415 patent and pull details on the most on-point ones.

Obviousness Analysis — US 11,402,415 B2 under 35 U.S.C. § 103

0. Scope note: what I treated as "the Prior Art section"

You asked me to use "the results from the Prior Art section of this page." The authoritative full text you supplied does not include the patent's face-page "(56) References Cited" list, so I retrieved the citation records associated with this patent and its pre-grant publication. The single most reliable prior-art source I recovered is the citation table on US 2022/0113690 A1 — the pre-grant publication of the same application, 17/070,720, which issued as the '415 (see https://patents.google.com/patent/US20220113690A1/en). That table lists the following of-record references, which I use as the backbone of this analysis:

Caveats on sourcing (stated honestly): (a) A search-step limit cut off my attempt to pull the granted '415's own face-page (56) list, so the table above is the same application's citation record, which I treat as an accurate proxy but could not verify against the granted face page; (b) the non-patent citations surfaced on a page associated with SolarCity's US 2013/0262040 A1 rather than the '415 itself — I flag that ambiguity rather than assert it; (c) I retrieved actual text only for US 2014/0019319 A1 (quoted below). For the other references I have title/date/assignee-level knowledge only, and I say so where it matters.

Contradiction with the earlier-generated section — flagged

The previously generated summary states that the granted claim 1 "appears to have been narrowed during prosecution by adding the offline-designation, template-wizard, and three-color-marker limitations." The retrieved text of published claim 1 of US 2022/0113690 A1 already recites the offline designation and the template wizard, verbatim:

"(2) moving the network device to one or more selected second physical locations wherein the building materials of the building prevent a successful connection to the communications network and the network device is designated as offline … the offline designation thereby preventing constant retries to connect to the communications network and preserving power on the network device …"
"(5) presenting one or more questions from a template wizard … (7) dynamically and automatically adding with the template wizard … any desired additional informational fields …"

(https://www.patents-review.com/a/20220113690-method-system-providing-energy-audits.html; https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/6a/6f/63/1978ec37652060/US20220113690A1.pdf)

So the "narrowing" characterization is at best partial: those two limitations were on file at publication. What published claim 1 does not appear to recite is the second and third marker colors — only "displaying the graphical marker in a first color" appears in published step (4). It is therefore plausible that the multipolar color scheme was added before grant, but I could not verify the granted claim text directly. My element mapping below uses published claim 1 (which the earlier section treats as materially the same as granted claim 1) and notes where the color scheme is the only meaningful delta.

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1. Legal framework applied

• Governing statute/law: AIA 35 U.S.C. § 103 (§ 102(a)(1)/(a)(2) art). The '415 claims no benefit of an earlier application; its priority date and filing date are both 2020-10-14 (per the authoritative text). All references in the table above pre-date that date except the post-dating citation US 2023/0079241 A1, which is not prior art.
• Test: Graham v. John Deere Co., 383 U.S. 1 (1966) — scope/content of the prior art, differences between prior art and claims, PHOSITA level, secondary considerations.
• Combination standard: KSR Int'l Co. v. Teleflex Inc., 550 U.S. 398 (2007) — a combination of familiar elements according to known methods is obvious when it yields predictable results; "obvious to try"; design incentives and market forces count as motivations.
• "Where the invention is a combination of known elements," a teaching, suggestion, or motivation ("TSM") may be satisfied by (i) explicit teaching in the references, (ii) the knowledge of a PHOSITA, or (iii) the nature of the problem to be solved. In re Kahn, 441 F.3d 977 (Fed. Cir. 2006); Perfect Web Techs. v. InfoUSA, 587 F.3d 1324 (Fed. Cir. 2009).

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2. Person Having Ordinary Skill in the Art (PHOSITA)

A PHOSITA for the '415 is a person with a bachelor's degree in electrical/computer engineering, computer science, or building/energy engineering, plus roughly two to three years of experience developing mobile field-data-collection applications and/or performing commercial building energy audits. That person would be familiar with: mobile/tablet app development; offline-first data capture with deferred synchronization; form/template and "wizard" UI engines; CAD/BIM floorplans (Autodesk, Revit, AutoCAD — named in the '415 spec at ¶¶0192–0193); standard energy-audit practice and handheld audit instrumentation (per the Auditing handbook category, e.g., Thumann & Younger, Handbook of Energy Audits (2008), a non-patent reference surfaced in the family's citation records); and web/cloud back-ends.

The specification itself concedes that almost every sub-problem is known prior to the invention — inconsistent engineer-by-engineer notetaking, unreadable handwritten notes, difficulty managing many photos, signal-blocked concrete/steel buildings, and battery drain from constant reconnect attempts. Those concessions matter: they frame the invention as an integration of known solutions to known problems, which is the classic § 103 posture post-KSR.

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3. The most on-point reference: US 2014/0019319 A1 (Honeywell)

This is the strongest single reference. The retrieved text (https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/f0/54/f4/6ad630a57ee713/US20140019319A1.pdf, ¶¶[0030]–[0033]) discloses:

• A mobile, camera-enabled device running an "energy audit application" with a "room-based asset reporting and audit interface" that lets the user "perform an energy audit using a touchscreen tablet device (e.g., iPad, Android tablet), smart phone, or other touchscreen device" — ¶¶[0030]–[0031].
• Floorplan/room-anchored asset tracking (the title is literally "Floorplan-based residential energy audit and asset tracking"), with the application "automatically creat[ing] templates 120" of rooms — i.e., a template-driven audit keyed to locations on a building plan — ¶[0033].
• Alternate online/offline operation with deferred synchronization, in terms that map almost word-for-word onto the '415's core concept:

"The application may run in an online mode while connected to the remote server, or the application may run in an offline mode while not connected to the remote server. When the application is run in offline mode, the information may synchronize when the mobile device is able to connect to the remote server (e.g., when wireless internet is reconnected). Data collected throughout the energy audit process may be stored. When the user exits the application in the middle of the audit, the information may be stored temporarily, and subsequently the user may continue when the user reopens the application." — ¶[0032]

• Multi-device / cross-device continuity: "The user may access his or her audit information from a different device, and the information may be viewed or editing by downloading or accessing the information from a new device." — ¶[0032] (supports the claim's "identical on the network device and the server network device" synchronization requirement).

That single reference reaches: the mobile audit application, the electronic floorplan/room template basis, camera-based capture, offline capture, and automatic re-sync on reconnection. What it does not plainly recite are: (i) the express "designated as offline … preventing constant retries … preserving power" framing; (ii) the Q&A template wizard that dynamically adds fields mid-audit; (iii) the multi-color marker progress scheme; and (iv) the audio + keyboard + camera triad as a claimed combination.

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4. Element-by-element mapping, claim 1 (independent method claim)

Element letters correspond to the published/granted claim-1 steps.

Independent claims 22 (CRM) and 23 (system) contain substantially parallel limitations, so the same grounds apply; claim 23 additionally recites "one or more server network devices," which the referenced systems (Honeywell, SolarCity, Ecoinsight, Opower) all inherently include.

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5. Proposed § 103 grounds

Ground 1 — US 2014/0019319 A1 alone (anticipation-adjacent; § 102/§ 103)

US 2014/0019319 A1 discloses the mobile device-based energy-audit application anchored to a floorplan/rooms, camera-enabled capture, dynamically generated per-room templates, online/offline operation, and automatic synchronization on reconnection. To the extent the claim's remaining deltas (battery-preserving offline designation; Q&A wizard field generation; multi-color markers) are treated as minor practicalities, this reference supports an obviousness position on its own. Best characterized as a § 102 reference for most elements and a § 103 reference for the residue.

Ground 2 — Honeywell '939 + US 8,805,000 B2 + US 2011/0029341 A1 (Ecoinsight)

• Motivation: All three are in the same field (building/facility energy auditing and energy-information gathering), address the same recognized problems (inconsistent, non-reproducible field data; fragmented audit records), and would be found by a PHOSITA performing a routine search of the energy-audit software art. Honeywell's own two references are commonly-owned and complementary (a floorplan-anchored audit app plus a mobile energy-audit system) — combining a company's own mobile-audit tool with its own floorplan-tracking tool is the paradigm of KSR's "familiar elements according to known methods."
• Result: predictable aggregation of known audit functions — no unexpected result.

Ground 3 — US 9,026,405 B2 (SolarCity) + US 2014/0019319 A1 + CN 109196543 A

• SolarCity's "Systems and methods for home energy auditing" supplies the mobile/home energy-audit platform and report generation; Honeywell '939 supplies the floorplan-anchored, offline/sync architecture; CN 109196543 A ("Online energy auditing system") supplies the networked/online audit-system back-end and synchronization context.
• Motivation: explicit in the references themselves — the field was actively migrating audit workflows from paper to mobile/tablet, and each reference identifies the same goal (a standard, reproducible, centrally-aggregated audit). KSR holds that a PHOSITA facing a known problem with a finite number of identified, predictable solutions is motivated to try them.

Ground 4 — Adding analytics/recommendation references for the dependent claims

• US 11,403,647 B2 (Case Western, priority 2018-05-10: "data analytics for virtual energy audits and value capture assessment") and US 9,958,360 B2 (Opower) supply AI/analytics over collected building-energy data. A PHOSITA would combine these with the mobile capture platform to auto-analyze the captured audit data and generate retrofit recommendations — the '415's own specification frames AI as optional and describes only conventional techniques (predictive analysis, anomaly detection, clustering) applied to the captured data.
• US 8,285,603 B2 (Revolution Environmental) and US 2009/0319308 A1 (Guiltner, "Equipment retrofitting project method") supply the recommendation/report and retrofit-project aspects, including product identification.

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6. Why a PHOSITA would have combined these — motivation articulated

1. Same field of endeavor and same problem. Every reference is directed to building energy auditing and/or auditing data management. KSR, 550 U.S. at 417; In re Bigio, 381 F.3d 1320 (Fed. Cir. 2004).
2. The specification concedes the problems were known. The '415's Background lists, as existing problems: inconsistent ad-hoc notation, unreadable handwritten notes, photo-management difficulty, buildings that block wireless signals, and battery drain from reconnection attempts. Identifying a known problem does not make its solution non-obvious.
3. Predictable, finite solutions. Offline-first capture with deferred sync, dynamic form/template wizards, and color-coded status markers were each well-known, category-level solutions by 2020 — the combination yields nothing more than the expected sum of its parts (no synergistic or unexpected result).
4. Design incentives. Portable devices in steel-and-concrete buildings create a recognized radio-link problem; suppressing connection retries to save battery is a straightforward engineering tradeoff that the field routinely made (mobile-OS power-management APIs, background-fetch scheduling). The '415's own specification frames the "offline designation" as an implementation choice made because the building blocks the signal.
5. Market/competitive pressure. The citation record shows multiple large vendors (Honeywell, SolarCity, GE, Opower, Ecoinsight) commercializing mobile/tablet energy-audit tooling in the 2011–2018 window — precisely the kind of industry momentum KSR treats as a motivation to combine.

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7. Dependent claims — abbreviated view

• AI methods (predictive analysis / anomaly detection / clustering, with or without Big Data) — US 11,403,647 B2; US 9,958,360 B2. These are generic, well-known statistical/ML techniques, and the '415 expressly states the invention "can be practiced without AI," so the AI limitations add little patentable weight.
• Additional sensing components (laser/LIDAR distance, GPS, electric/lumen/airflow/water-flow/pressure meters, thermometer) — handheld audit instrumentation is standard practice (see the Handbook of Energy Audits non-patent citation), and smartphone GPS/accelerometer integration is conventional; using existing device hardware for measurement is expressly contemplated in the '415.
• Energy-producing components (solar/wind/water/biomass) — PV Solutions references (US 10,326,278; US 10,008,974) and SolarCity's PV-centric audit art.
• Cloud/SaaS implementation, cloud storage objects, APIs, REST/SOAP — the Lesavich cloud-computing references (US 2011/0208710 A1; US 2012/0278622 A1) cited in the family, plus the '415's own generic cloud disclosure; cloud delivery is a non-limiting implementation detail.
• 360° camera, UAV/drone, wearable devices, IoT devices, driverless vehicles, RCS/SMS messaging — commodity hardware/communication channels; no non-obvious integration is claimed.
• Wireless interfaces (claim 18, dependent on claim 1) — 802.11/Wi-Fi/Bluetooth/ZigBee/WiMAX were all standard by 2020.

None of these dependent limitations appears to supply a saving distinction over Grounds 1–4.

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8. Likely patentee rebuttals and how they fare

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9. Bottom line

The '415 is best characterized as an integration patent that aggregates individually known mobile-audit techniques into a single tablet/phone workflow. On the prior art actually of record for this application:

1. US 2014/0019319 A1 (Honeywell) is the most dangerous reference and independently discloses most of independent claims 1, 22, and 23 — a mobile, camera-enabled, floorplan-anchored energy-audit application with dynamically generated templates, offline capture, and automatic re-synchronization on reconnection.
2. US 8,805,000 B2 (Honeywell), US 9,026,405 B2 (SolarCity), US 2011/0029341 A1 (Ecoinsight), and CN 109196543 A together supply the remaining mobile-audit, report-generation, and online-back-end context; each is in the same field, cites the same problems, and would be combined by a PHOSITA under KSR.
3. US 11,403,647 B2 (Case Western) and US 9,958,360 B2 (Opower) dispose of the AI/analytics-dependent subject matter, and US 8,285,603 B2 / US 2009/0319308 A1 dispose of the retrofit-recommendation and sourcing-dependent subject matter.
4. The realistic remaining battleground is narrow and almost entirely linguistic: the "designated as offline … preventing constant retries … preserving power" limitation (claim 1 step (2)) and, secondarily, the second/third marker colors. If those are the only true deltas over Honeywell '939, an obviousness case is available but would benefit from a dedicated power-management secondary reference or a documented "known design choice" rationale.

Caveats on this analysis. This is a technical § 103 analysis identifying candidate grounds, not a legal opinion or a validity conclusion. I could not verify the granted claim text or the prosecution history directly (a search-step limit cut off retrieval of the '415 face page and file wrapper), and for every reference except US 2014/0019319 A1 I am working from title/date/assignee-level data rather than full-text paragraph citations — so paragraph-level pinpoint citations for those references should be independently confirmed before any ground is relied upon. I also found no litigation involving US 11,402,415 (consistent with the earlier litigation section), so there is no opponent's claim construction or institution decision to anchor the analysis; if a PTAB or district-court proceeding exists outside my search coverage, its grounds would supersede the proposed combinations above.