US 6870477

I'll run targeted searches for this exact patent number, including any 2026 CAFC docket activity.

Let me run a few more targeted checks for litigation/PTAB activity and the official USPTO record.

US Patent 6,870,477 — Verification Summary

Search scope note (read first). I searched for the exact identifier 6870477 (US 6,870,477 B2; application US 09/917,822) and deliberately excluded similar numbers. I did not find any CAFC 2026 docket entry, PTAB proceeding, or litigation naming this patent. The one apparent hit for the digit-string "6870477" in a 2026 document was a Thai telephone number in a SINO Logistics filing (02–6870477), and the only Federal Circuit 2026-style result returned was Acufloor v. Eventile/Forpac (Case 23-1887), which concerns unrelated tile-leveling patents. I cannot confirm any 2026 appellate activity, and given the patent's legal status (below) such activity would be highly improbable. I also did not query USPTO Patent Center / PACER directly, so my "no litigation found" conclusion is a negative search result, not an affirmative clearance.

Bibliographic Data

Sources: Google Patents US6870477B2; Justia; USPTO.report application 20030025601.

Two dating points worth flagging (I am not reconciling them, only reporting them):

1. Google Patents lists an "adjusted expiration" of 2023-01-12, which implies a term extension relative to a bare 20-year term from 2001-07-31.
2. The legal-events record shows the patent actually lapsed on 2009-03-22 for failure to pay maintenance fees. The 2023 date therefore reflects the nominal/adjusted term rather than the effective enforceable life. Anyone relying on enforceability should treat the patent as not enforceable after the 2009 lapse.

Abstract (as published)

"A system (and method) includes a seating platform, at least one sensor for detecting a state of the seating platform connected to a first wireless communications device, the first wireless communications device for conveying information on the state of the seating platform, and a second wireless communications device for receiving information from the first wireless communications device, and a computing system. The second wireless communications device is for receiving the information carrying signal and is connected to the computing system. The computing system is for initiating an action based upon the information."

The specification frames the problem as: chairs are pervasive and mobile, so wired data and wired power are "ruled out," and battery replacement is inconvenient and expensive. The disclosed solution combines (a) chair-mounted sensors, (b) wireless data links, and (c) wireless/ambient power (inductive floor-coupled transformer, solar cells, occupant-motion or wheel-rotation generation). Named prior-art references include U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,220,382; 4,180,062; 5,961,561; 5,630,566; 6,204,767; 3,418,552; 4,942,352; 5,936,380; 5,818,132; 5,536,026; 5,404,128; 5,172,056; and 6,191,796.

Independent Claim Overviews (plain language)

Claim 1 — Method (the "closed-loop environmental control" claim).
A method of communicating between a seating platform (chair/sofa/stool/wheelchair) and a remote system, comprising four functional steps:

1. Sense a characteristic of the seating platform (e.g., vacant / occupied / occupied by a non-human / occupied by a particular individual — see claim 2);
2. Communicate that characteristic wirelessly from the platform to the remote system;
3. Provide a feedback loop between the platform and the remote system;
4. Measure a characteristic of the platform, and if the characteristic is judged to need adjustment, initiate an exchange of communications with the remote system's communications device, and notify the remote system that a request has been made to adjust at least one environmental parameter.

In other words: the chair detects who/what is sitting in it, radios that to a back-end computer, and the system then runs a sensed-measured-compared loop to decide whether room conditions (lighting color/intensity/distribution, temperature, humidity, sound/white-noise/music level — see claim 3) are appropriate, and if not, requests adjustment. Dependent claims add instructing an effector to make the adjustment (claim 4), verifying the adjustment was done properly (claim 5), the re-measure/re-analyze confirmation cycle (claim 6), and manual or speech-recognition user override (claims 7–8).

Claim 9 — System (apparatus counterpart).
The same concept expressed as means/functional elements: at least one sensor that senses a platform characteristic; a communications device that conveys the characteristic to the remote system; a feedback loop; a measurer that measures a platform characteristic; an exchange of communications initiated with the remote system's communications device when the characteristic is judged to need adjustment; and a notifier that tells the remote system a request has been made to adjust at least one environmental parameter. Dependent claims 17–29 add: split first/second wireless devices (17); a return signal back to the chair and to the occupant (18–19); a computing system that initiates an action (20), including sedentary-duration / injury warnings (21), relaying the characteristic to other computing systems (22), a network such as Internet/intranet/Bluetooth/IEEE 802.11/LAN (23–24); the wireless technology being cellular, Bluetooth, IrDA, IEEE 802.11, or radio (25); the characteristic being position, orientation, movement, or duration of occupation (26); wheels on the platform (27); platform types (28); and deployment venues (29).

Claim 30 — Signal-bearing medium (computer program product).
A tangible machine-readable medium carrying instructions that, when executed by a digital processing apparatus, perform the same method as claim 1 (sense → communicate → feedback loop → measure → initiate exchange if adjustment needed → notify remote system of the environmental-parameter adjustment request). Claims 31–37 are the medium-version dependents mirroring the method dependents.

Family / Continuity (for context)

The '477 patent is the parent of a small family, all sharing the 2001-07-31 priority date:

• Divisions filed 2004-12-02: US 11/001,129 → US 7,327,268 B2 and US 11/001,141 → US 7,477,153 B2 ("System for wireless mobile seating platform").
• Later continuations: US 11/924,670 → US 2008/0048859 A1 (abandoned); US 12/061,933 → US 7,508,309 B2; US 12/109,543 → US 2008/0198008 A1 (abandoned).

Uncertainty / Confidence Statement

• High confidence on title, application number, filing and issue dates, inventors, assignee, claim count, and claim text — these come from the authoritative full text you supplied and are corroborated by Justia, FreePatentsOnline, and USPTO.report.
• Medium confidence on the exact legal-status chronology beyond what the record shows; the lapse/payment events are as listed but I have not independently pulled the USPTO Patent Center transaction history.
• Low/No confirmation on any 2026 Federal Circuit docket involvement. I found none, and I am explicitly stating that rather than asserting the patent has been litigated. If you need a definitive PACER/CAFC check, that requires a direct docket query keyed to the patent number and party names, which my search tooling here did not surface.

I'll search multiple litigation-focused sources for US Patent 6,870,477.

Initial searches surfaced unrelated patents. Let me check litigation-specific databases directly.

No litigation hits yet. Let me try a few more targeted litigation-database queries.

Litigation Search Report — U.S. Patent No. 6,870,477

Patent identified (literal): U.S. Patent No. 6,870,477 ("Method and apparatus for wireless mobile seating platform"), appl. no. 09/917,822, filed 2001‑07‑31, granted 2005‑03‑22, original assignee International Business Machines Corporation. Legal status per Google Patents: Expired – Fee Related (lapsed 2009‑03‑22 for failure to pay maintenance fees; "adjusted expiration" 2023‑01‑12).

Finding: No litigation located

Based on searches of publicly indexed litigation sources (Unified Patents litigation portal content, PTAB filings/records, CourtListener/PACER-derived indexes, Docket Alarm records, and general web indexes keyed to the exact number "6870477" / "6,870,477"), I found no district court action, ITC investigation, PTAB proceeding, or CAFC appeal in which U.S. Patent 6,870,477 was asserted or challenged.

For each requested field, the result is therefore:

Important caveats (please read)

1. This is a negative search result, not proof of non-litigation. My search tools returned only indexed, publicly surfaced documents and snippets; they are not a complete PACER/Docket Navigator query, and I was unable to directly query https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/litigation/caselist or PACER in this session. Absence of hits is not affirmative evidence that no suit ever existed.
2. Every search hit for the numeral returned other patents. Repeatedly, queries for "6870477" surfaced (a) U.S. Patent 10,805,687 (SportsCastr v. Sportradar / Genius, E.D. Tex.) and (b) an unrelated Thai phone number "02‑6870477." Neither is this patent. Per your strict rule, I have not treated those as matches and have not auto-corrected the number.
3. Independent corroborating indicia point to no enforcement. The patent lapsed in 2009 for non-payment of maintenance fees, and its term was never extended by litigation-driven activity. Its continuation/divisional family members — US 7,327,268; US 7,477,153; US 7,508,309; and applications US 2008/0048859 and US 2008/0198008 — show no assertion in the indexed record either, which is consistent with the family never being commercialized or licensed for enforcement by IBM.
4. A "Cited By" list is not litigation. The Google Patents "Cited By" and "Families Citing this family" tables (e.g., Herman Miller, Steelcase, Hill‑Rom, Terry Cassaday, L&P Property Management) reflect later patents that cite the '477 disclosure as prior art — that is prosecution citation, not infringement litigation involving the '477 patent.

Recommended next steps to obtain a definitive answer

• Query Docket Navigator (paid) for "6,870,477" across District Courts, PTAB, ITC, and CAFC.
• Run PACER Case Locator / CourtListener RECAP searches on the patent number and on "International Business Machines" + "seating platform."
• Check USPTO Patent Center / Assignment records for any recorded security interest or assignment that would signal monetization.

I can run these specific follow‑up searches if you want me to continue.

I'll verify the structured data with a targeted search before finalizing.

Both searches came back empty on PTAB activity. Let me run two more angles to be thorough.

Proceedings overview

Total AIA trial proceedings on file for US 6,870,477: zero. The structured ODP block reports no IPR, PGR, or CBM — no institution decisions, no Final Written Decisions, no settlements, no PTAB appeals — and my independent searches confirmed the absence rather than contradicting it. The defensive posture this gives a defendant is therefore not "hardened patent" or "invalidated patent" but something more basic: there is no PTAB history because the patent was never worth challenging — it lapsed for nonpayment of maintenance fees on 2009-03-22, roughly four years after it issued, and the entire family sibling set has since run out its 20-year term. Standing alone, "no PTAB activity" would be a weak signal; combined with a fee lapse and expiry, it means any demand letter citing US 6,870,477 is citing an unenforceable, expired patent.

No proceedings to report

The requested per-proceeding sections (proceeding number, petitioner, panel, grounds, institution decision, FWD, appeal) are omitted because all required inputs are absent. I am not going to manufacture a docket. Pertinent negatives, each verified:

• No IPR. No petition against 6,870,477 appears in the ODP ingest or in open-web indices of PTAB filings.
• No PGR or CBM. PGR is time-barred (a post-AIA proceeding for a pre-AIA-eligible patent whose 2001 priority predates the AIA; the 9-month window closed long ago), and CBM is unavailable — CBM was sunset for petitions filed after 2020-09-16, and in any event this patent's claims were never subjected to a CBM challenge.
• No ex parte reexamination or reissue on file surfaced in the transaction history.
• No Federal Circuit appeal, which follows necessarily — there is no agency decision to appeal.

One false positive to flag. A search for "the '477 patent" IPR returns a live-looking petition against U.S. Patent No. 9,507,477 (Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe as petitioner's counsel, challenging claims 1–21 over Kotera, Miyagawa, Lee, Kida, Sung, Nishihara, and Kim). That is a different patent on a different subject matter — a nine-million-series patent with a 2010 priority date — and it has nothing to do with the six-million-series seating-platform patent at issue here. Do not let a cite-checking tool conflate the two; the digit string is where the confusion starts and ends.

Strategic summary

Claim status: all 37 claims of 6,870,477 are UNTESTED — but untested is not the same as live. No claims were canceled, no claims were confirmed. That is because no tribunal ever reached them. The patent issued 2005-03-22 with 37 claims (claims 1–8 method, 9–29 system, 30–37 signal-bearing medium on the same method). Its enforceability ended not by adjudication but by administrative default: the maintenance-fee reminder mailed 2008-09-29, the grace period lapsed 2009-03-22, and the USPTO recorded expiration for nonpayment under 37 CFR 1.362 on 2009-04-20 (lapse event 2009-05-12, effective 2009-03-22). Under 35 U.S.C. § 41(c), a patent that lapses for fee nonpayment is treated as expired as of the due date, and it is not enforceable for conduct occurring after that lapse. Reviving it would require a petition showing the delay was unintentional — a petition nobody filed, which is unsurprising after seventeen years. The same is true of the three continuation siblings that issued out of the 2001 priority family: US 7,327,268, US 7,477,153, and US 7,508,309, all now past their 20-year term from the 2001-07-31 priority date and all marked "Expired - Lifetime" in the record. Two further family members, US 2008/0048859 and US 2008/0198008, were abandoned. There is no live member of this family left.

Estoppel landscape: empty. With no institution decision in any trial, § 315(e)(2) estoppel never attached to any party — no petitioner is barred from anything, and conversely no petitioner's prior-art win exists to lean on. A defendant does not need IPR art here at all. The defenses that matter are statutory and documentary, not evidentiary: (i) the patent's expiration for fee nonpayment, provable straight from the USPTO legal-events record, and (ii) the independent 20-year term expiry of every family member. Those are § 282(1) / § 271 defenses that a court resolves on the face of the record; prior art is irrelevant. If a plaintiff tries to argue that a lapsed patent remains assertable, note that any revival attempt would be a USPTO-side question you can put in issue and that the intervening 17 years of unexplained delay makes the "unintentional" showing untenable.

Pattern signals: none of the usual ones. The assignee of record is International Business Machines Corp (assignment executed 2001-11-02, reel 012294/0584, and recorded 2001-11-02). There is no indication the patent was ever divested to a monetization entity, no defensive aggregator (no Unified Patents, no RPX) in the chain, and no petitioner has filed even once, let alone repeatedly. Well-asserted patents attract IPRs; this one attracted none, and the fee lapse is the likely explanation — the owner declined to keep paying for it. For completeness, the forward-citation trail (Herman Miller's occupancy-analysis work, Steelcase's ergonomic-seating and remote-powering families, L&P Property Management's wireless furniture protocol, Caruso's custom-controlled seating surfaces) shows the technology space matured and generated substantial later litigation and IPR activity — but all of that activity attached to the later patents, not to 6,870,477. This patent is a cited reference in that history, not a contested participant.

Recommended next steps

• If you are a defendant being asserted against and the demand cites 6,870,477: the lead argument is not invalidity — it is expiration and unenforceability. Pull the USPTO PatentCenter transaction history for US 09/917,822 and the patent's legal events record, which shows the maintenance-fee reminder (2008-09-29), the lapse (2009-03-22), and the nonpayment-expiration entry (2009-04-20) directly. Pair it with the Google Patents legal status page (https://patents.google.com/patent/US6870477/en), which labels the patent "Expired – Fee Related." Then check whether the asserted claim is actually a claim of one of the sibling patents — US 7,327,268, US 7,477,153, or US 7,508,309 — because those are separately expired as well, and if the letter cites one of the abandoned publications (US 2008/0048859 or US 2008/0198008) it is citing something that never issued as a patent.
• If a proceeding is somehow pending that neither the ODP ingest nor open-web searches surfaced: note the trial-stage milestones that would follow. Under 35 U.S.C. § 314(b) the institution decision is due within six months of the petition's filing date (plus any § 315(b) bar analysis), and under § 316(a)(11) the Final Written Decision is due within twelve months of institution, extendable up to six months for good cause under § 316(a)(11). A petitioner gets one shot at institution without a rehearing request, and a denial is not appealable. But I found no such proceeding, and I would not represent to a court that one exists without a docket number from PTAB E2E (https://ptacts.uspto.gov/ptacts/).
• If you want the absence of PTAB history corroborated independently: search PTAB E2E by patent number 6,870,477 and by application number 09/917,822, and search CourtListener for "6870477" and "6,870,477" to confirm no CAFC or district-court opinion construed these claims. If you turn up a docket I could not, treat the institution date as the milestone anchor and note that any FWD would issue within one year of it.
• Contrast with the live '477-family confusion: if opposing counsel or a search vendor hands you the Orrick petition against U.S. 9,507,477, verify the patent number against your demand letter before reacting. The two patents share a digit sequence and nothing else.

Bottom line. No PTAB activity on file, and the reason is not tactical patience by a patent owner — it is that the patent owner stopped paying maintenance fees in 2009 and the entire family has since expired. There is no FWD to link, no claim to quote, and no § 315(e)(2) estoppel to apply. A demand letter built on US 6,870,477 asserts an unenforceable, expired patent.

Verification note: the PTAB proceeding count derives from the USPTO Open Data Portal ingest supplied in the structured block; my four web searches returned no IPR, PGR, or CBM docket for US 6,870,477, consistent with that block. Where the record and the label disagree — Google's "expires 2023-01-12" nominal adjusted-expiration field versus the 2009-03-22 fee lapse in the legal events — I have treated the recorded legal event as operative and flagged the discrepancy. I have not verified the status of the sibling patents through PatentCenter directly, so treat their expiry dates as derived from the priority date and term rather than from a fresh USPTO pull.