US 9989397

I'll search for authoritative information on US 9989397 and any litigation involving it.

Let me search for litigation and the specific claim set for this patent.

US Patent 9,989,397 — Analyst Summary

Interpretation note: I treated the identifier literally as US 9,989,397 B1 and did not auto-correct it. Note that a very closely related sibling exists — US 9,709,431 B1 ("Water management sensing," issued July 18, 2017) — and search results sometimes surface the two together. Everything below is tied to the '397 number unless flagged.

Bibliographic data (from the authoritative patent text you supplied)

Abstract (verbatim)

"In some implementations, a system obtains activity data for a sump pump associated with a property where the obtained activity data indicates a present operational status of the sump pump. The system obtains water level data associated with the property where the water level data indicates a level of water within the property, determines that the activity data indicates that the sump pump is operating and that the water level within the property satisfies a water level risk threshold, and, in response to the determination that the activity data indicates that the sump pump is operating and that the water level within the property satisfies a water level risk threshold, provides a notification that the property is at risk of suffering water damage."

Plain-language overview of the disclosed technology

The patent addresses a common failure mode of basement sump pumps: the pump is running but is underpowered, clogged, or otherwise malfunctioning, so the sump basin water level keeps rising. The system fuses two sensor streams — a sump pump sensor (is the pump on/off or actively pumping?) and a water level sensor (is the water at/above a risk threshold?) — and, when the pump is ON and the water level is still high, concludes the property is at elevated risk of water damage and issues an alert.

The specification (FIG. 1) describes a monitoring system control unit (110) with a controller (112) and network module (114), mobile devices (150/160) running native apps, and an application server (170). FIG. 2 shows user interfaces (system settings, sump pump status "ON"/"SERVICE NEEDED," local weather, rainfall prediction, and a mobile notification reading "Your sump pump may be malfunctioning as it is ON, but your water level is HIGH — your basement is in risk for flooding"). FIGS. 3–4 are flowcharts. Additional disclosed refinements include:

• Computing "sump pump utilization" (average time‑rate volumetric reduction) and comparing it to a reference to gauge efficiency, and adjusting pump speed.
• Adjusting the water‑level risk threshold based on weather/precipitation (raising it in dry seasons, lowering it during heavy rain).
• Using occupancy, weather data, an external rain sensor, neighborhood/community leak data (e.g., a community pipe burst), and run‑off characteristics (lot size, grading, gutters) to modulate the susceptibility score and alert routing.
• Routing alerts to the owner and/or a third‑party service provider, adding action items, and generating service requests.

Independent claims — overview and important caveat

⚠️ Uncertainty flag (authoritative-source gap): The full patent text you supplied is truncated in the FIG. 4 discussion and does not include the "What is claimed is" claim set. My searches did not return a verified, claim‑numbered copy of the '397 claims specifically (search hits returned claim text that is interspersed with the sibling '431 patent's family table, so I cannot attribute it to '397 with confidence). Accordingly, I will not represent verbatim claim numbers for '397.

The independent claim scope, consistent with the abstract and the "Determining that the sump pump is operating and the water level within the property satisfies a water level risk threshold" / "Providing a notification that the property is at risk of suffering water damage" flowchart boxes (FIG. 4, steps 410–440), is a system/method/computer‑readable‑medium triad directed to:

1. Obtaining activity data for a sump pump at a property, the data indicating the pump's present operational status (pumping vs. not pumping).
2. Obtaining water level data for the property, indicating the water level (e.g., from a water level sensor that outputs a binary "water has reached the sensor" signal, or a measured height).
3. Determining that the activity data indicates the pump is operating and that the water level satisfies a water level risk threshold.
4. In response, providing a notification (to a mobile device / monitoring server) that the property is at risk of suffering water damage.

Features such as deriving the threshold from weather data (reducing a default threshold based on measured rainfall), using irrigation‑system data to set the threshold, and gating the notification on a water damage susceptibility score meeting a threshold appear in the claim language surfaced by search, but I could not confirm those depend from '397 rather than the parent/continuation family. Treat those as likely dependent‑claim subject matter, not confirmed independent‑claim scope.

Litigation / CAFC 2026 docket search — result

No CAFC 2026 docket entry for US 9,989,397 was found. Targeted searches for 9989397 / 9,989,397 in a Federal Circuit context returned no results, and no 2026 appellate activity tied to this number appeared.

For context (not confirmation that the '397 patent is asserted): Alarm.com has been an active patent litigant — including Alarm.com v. iControl (D. Del.), Alarm.com v. ipDataTel (S.D. Tex., No. 4:18‑cv‑02108, five asserted patents: the '090, '385, '736 and others), and Alarm.com v. Vivint. None of the retrieved dockets identified 9,989,397 as a patent‑in‑suit, so I make no assertion that the '397 patent has been litigated. If a 2026 CAFC appeal exists, it did not surface in these searches — I cannot confirm or deny it with the data available.

Bottom line

US 9,989,397 B1 (Alarm.com, Kinney et al., issued June 5, 2018, priority April 14, 2015) claims a sensor‑fusion approach that flags water‑damage risk when a sump pump is reported running while the water level remains at/above a risk threshold, and then alerts the owner/service provider. Title, assignee, inventors, dates, abstract, and classification data are authoritative from the supplied text. The exact independent‑claim wording and any CAFC/litigation involvement are the two points I could not verify authoritatively — I recommend pulling the granted claims directly from USPTO Patent Center / Patent Public Search for 9,989,397 to finalize claim scope.

I'll search for litigation specifically involving US Patent 9989397.

Let me dig deeper with more targeted searches.

Let me try a few more targeted searches on litigation databases and the specific patent number.

Litigation Search: US Patent 9,989,397

Bottom line

I found no litigation — no district court case, no ITC investigation, no PTAB proceeding, and no CAFC appeal — that identifies US Patent 9,989,397 ("Water management sensing") as a patent-in-suit, an asserted patent, or a challenged patent. Based on the searches available to me, there is no known litigation specifically involving this patent. I want to be explicit about that rather than substitute results for a different patent number.

What US 9,989,397 is

• Patent: US 9,989,397 B1, "Water management sensing"
• Original / current assignee: Alarm.com Incorporated
• Inventors: Kinney, Heffernan, Williams, Goodman, Qin
• Application: US 15/651,786, filed July 17, 2017 (continuation of Ser. No. 15/098,564, filed April 14, 2016; provisional 62/147,339, filed April 14, 2015)
• Granted: June 5, 2018; anticipated expiration April 14, 2036
• Security interests: Silicon Valley Bank (recorded Oct. 10, 2017; released Jan. 21, 2021)
• Family note: A closely related patent, US 9,709,431 B1 ("Water management sensing"), shares the same 62/147,339 provisional priority. I did not find litigation on that number either.

"Similar number" results I deliberately excluded

Several search hits referenced other patents owned by Alarm.com or unrelated parties; none of these is US 9,989,397, so I am not treating them as litigation on this patent:

• Alarm.com Inc. v. ipDatatel, LLC, No. 4:18-cv-02108 (S.D. Tex.) — asserted US 7,113,090; 7,633,385; 7,956,736; 8,478,871; 9,141,276. Docket No. H-18-2108, 383 F. Supp. 3d 719 (S.D. Tex. 2019).
• Causam Energy-related matters (ITC Inv. 337-TA-*; e.g., final ID Feb. 16, 2023) — asserted US 8,738,522; 9,793,268; 9,831,552; 10,396,592; etc. (Alarm.com/EnergyHub were respondents, not owners of '397).
• XR Communications (Vivato) v. AT&T/Ericsson, Nos. 2:23-cv-00202, -00203 (E.D. Tex.) — asserted US 7,177,369; 8,289,939; 8,737,511; 10,715,235.
• Ozmo Licensing LLC v. HP/Acer/Dell — asserted US 9,991,991 (different patent).
• iControl v. Alarm.com (D. Del.) — asserted the iControl patent family; Alarm.com counterclaimed on '090, '694, '202.

These belong to the same corporate ecosystem but are different patent numbers and none involves the '397 patent.

Caveats on completeness

• My searches were run against general web/patent portals (Google Patents, FreePatentsOnline, CourtListener, Justia, SEC 10-Q/10-K "Legal Proceedings" disclosures, ITC Federal Register notices, and PTAB petitions). I was not able to query PACER or the Unified Patents litigation portal directly within this session (my tool calls were cut off).
• Patent litigation is sometimes filed and resolved without a searchable public record naming every asserted patent, and a suit filed very recently may not yet be indexed.
• I therefore state the negative result with moderate-to-high confidence but cannot certify it as exhaustive.

Recommended next steps to confirm

1. Unified Patents litigation portal — search "9989397" at portal.unifiedpatents.com/litigation.
2. PACER / Docket Alarm / RPX Insight — full-text search for "9,989,397" across district court dockets.
3. Lex Machina / Westlaw Litigation Analytics — query by patent number.
4. PTAB / USPTO Patent Trial and Appeal Board — check for any IPR/PGR naming the '397 patent.
5. Alarm.com SEC filings — review "Legal Proceedings" in Alarm.com Holdings 10-Q/10-K for any assertion involving its water-management patents (none of the disclosed matters I reviewed cite '397).

If you can confirm a specific court or party, I can help verify whether the '397 patent appears in that docket.

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

Let me run additional targeted checks on the patent's family and common PTAB challengers.

One more verification pass against PTAB-focused sources.

Proceedings overview

Zero AIA trial proceedings on file for US 9,989,397. The structured "PTAB proceedings on file" block (USPTO ODP, most recent ingest) returns no IPR, PGR, or CBM, and my verification searches surfaced no PTAB petition, institution decision, or Final Written Decision naming this patent — only Alarm.com's own IPR activity as a petitioner against Vivint patents (e.g., IPR2015-02008 on US 6,924,727; IPR2016-00161/00166 on US 6,462,654; IPRs on US 6,535,123 and US 6,147,601), which is unrelated to the '397 patent. Bottom line for a defendant: the patent is wholly untested at the PTAB — no claims are canceled, none have been sustained, and there is no estoppel to exploit. That cuts both ways: nothing is dead, but nothing is hardened either, and § 315(e)(2) estoppel has not attached to anyone.

Because there are no proceedings, I cannot populate per-proceeding sections without fabricating them. Instead, below is what the absence means and how to act on it.

(No proceeding to report)

There is no {PROCEEDING_NUMBER} — {Petitioner} v. Alarm.com, Inc. entry to write. The following is a factual negative finding, with sources:

• Patent: US 9,989,397 B1, "Water management sensing," original and current assignee Alarm.com Inc.; inventors Kinney, Heffernan, Williams, Goodman, Qin; filed 2017-07-17; granted 2018-06-05; priority 2015-04-14 (provisional 62/147,339); anticipated expiration 2036-04-14. Source: https://patents.google.com/patent/US9989397/en
• Family: the '397 is a continuation of Ser. No. 15/098,564 (filed 2016-04-14), which issued as US 9,709,431 B1 on 2017-07-18. Any validity attack must map the whole family, not just the '397.
• PTAB: no proceeding identified. USPTO PTAB E2E returned nothing for the patent number, and no CourtListener / CAFC docket hit exists (no FWD to appeal, so no appeal is possible).
• Litigation signal: I found no asserted patent litigation in which 9,989,397 is the asserted patent. Alarm.com's public filings describe it as a defendant against EcoFactor and Vivint, and as a serial IPR petitioner — not as a patent owner defending this patent in a PTAB trial.

Caveats I will not paper over: (1) the ODP ingest is a snapshot and could lag a very recently filed petition; (2) a party may have challenged the family's parent US 9,709,431 rather than the '397 specifically — I could not confirm or deny that within my search budget, and you should pull the PTAB E2E page for 9,709,431 and for applications 15/098,564 and 15/651,786 directly before relying on this. I did not locate any such proceeding, but I am flagging it as an open verification item rather than stating it as fact.

Strategic summary

Claim status: everything untested, everything alive. No claim of 9,989,397 has been canceled, confirmed, or even construed in a PTAB trial. Every claim you might face in an infringement assertion is live and carries a statutory presumption of validity. Practically, that means a demand letter citing the '397 has not been neutered by prior PTAB work — the "the troll already lost claim 1" defense is unavailable on this patent. Note the '397 is a narrow, relatively recent continuation in a crowded "sump pump / water management" art field, which is exactly the profile that tends to attract IPRs later rather than earlier (the patent only issued 2018-06-05, and IPRs are commonly triggered by assertion, not by grant).

Estoppel landscape: clean slate. Section 315(e)(2) estoppel bars only a petitioner (and its privies/real parties in interest) that obtained an institution decision — and it reaches grounds raised or reasonably could have raised. With no IPR ever instituted, no prior-art ground is foreclosed to any defendant. You can raise § 102 and § 103 art in the district court freely, and you can file an IPR on art that another defendant already used (no estoppel runs against you from a third party's petition, and no statutory preclusion exists absent their institution). The only clocks running are yours: § 315(b) — one year from service of a complaint alleging infringement of the '397 — and the post-grant window. PGR is unavailable: it is limited to first-inventor-to-file patents and must be filed within 9 months of grant; grant was 2018-06-05, so the PGR window closed 2019-03-05. IPR remains available for all claims at any time subject to § 315(b).

Pattern signals. No petitioner has filed against this patent, so there is no serial-petitioner or defensive-aggregator story to report — no Unified Patents IPR, no joinder chain, no multi-petition strategy. The relevant pattern is on the other side of the table: Alarm.com is a sophisticated, well-funded IPR user (its Vivint campaign produced multiple FWDs and Federal Circuit appeals, e.g., Vivint, Inc. v. Alarm.com Inc., No. 2017-2076 (Fed. Cir. July 26, 2018), and it pursued ex parte reexaminations). Expect a patent owner that understands PTAB procedure, will file a strong POPR, may seek discretionary denial under Fintiv-type factors, and will not be surprised by an IPR filing. Also note the Silicon Valley Bank security interest granted 2017-10-10 and released 2021-01-21 — a sign the IP portfolio, including this patent, has been collateralized, which is a mild signal the owner values it and is unlikely to abandon it quietly.

Recommended next steps

1. Verify the negative directly, don't take my word for it. Pull the PTAB E2E / Patent Trial and Appeal Board End-to-End page for US 9,989,397, and separately for the parent US 9,709,431 and applications 15/098,564 and 15/651,786. The ODP snapshot is authoritative as of ingest but can lag; a challenged parent would materially change your posture. PTAB E2E: https://ptacts.uspto.gov/ptacts/ ; patent page: https://patents.google.com/patent/US9989397/en
2. If you have been served with an infringement complaint on the '397, start the § 315(b) clock. You have one year from service to petition. If you intend to file an IPR, do it early — the art here is mechanical/monitoring art with a 2015 priority date, so pre-2015 printed publications are fair game and the prior-art universe is likely dense.
3. Prior-art leads to develop (unvetted — candidates for a search, not grounds): the search surfaced a cluster of nearby sump-pump monitoring art, including US 7,309,216 (Cummings) and US 7,458,782 (Cummings), and US 9,534,606 (Cummings) — a "sump pump system, including water level sensor shield." These are in the same field and predate the 2015 priority date. Treat as leads requiring a full clearance/search opinion, not as institution-ready grounds. Also mine the '397's and the '431's prosecution histories for cited art.
4. No PTAB disposition to cite. Since no FWD exists for this patent, there is no "link to the FWD and quote the disposition" available — there is nothing to quote, and I will not manufacture one. The correct defensive framing is: this patent has never been tested at the PTAB; its validity is an open question and all grounds are available.
5. Re-screen periodically. Given the age (granted 2018) and the assertion-friendly subject matter, an IPR or an ex parte reexamination could appear at any time. Re-pull the ODP block and PTAB E2E before finalizing any invalidity contentions or settlement position.

I'll research this patent's assignment record and related context.

Let me dig for the specific assignment reel/frame records and Alarm.com corporate context.

Let me look for the specific reel/frame records and Alarm.com's litigation/patent-assertion history.

Ownership Record — US 9,989,397 B1 ("Water management sensing")

Sources used: Google Patents legal-events panel for the patent (authoritative text provided in the working record, fetched 2026-09-24), plus cross-checks against Alarm.com Holdings, Inc. SEC filings (10-K/10-Q, 2017–2024), the SIPCO LLC v. Emerson Electric docket exhibit containing Alarm.com's recorded SVB security agreements (S.D. Tex. 4:18-cv-02689), and Alarm.com's litigation disclosures. USPTO Patent Assignment Center (https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/) and the legacy index (https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html) were not directly reachable as live primary records in this session; where reel/frame is not verifiable I say so rather than guessing.

Inventors

• All five are the same inventive entity named on the parent patent US 9,709,431 (application 15/098,564, filed 2016-04-14), which claims the 2015-04-14 provisional 62/147,339. US 9,989,397 is the continuation (15/651,786, filed 2017-07-17). The resident cities are consistent with Alarm.com's distributed R&D footprint around its Tysons, VA headquarters.
• Pattern check — inventors departing original assignee within 12 months: no evidence. All five appear on later Alarm.com filings in the same portfolio (Kinney later appears on Alarm.com grants such as the medication-management / property-monitoring families), and no portfolio sale followed. No fire-sale precursor signature.
• Accuracy note on name/number: do not conflate this patent with US 9,709,431 (parent) or with the Targeted News Service line that attributes the invention to "Alarm.com, Tysons, Virginia" for patent 9,709,431 — same inventors, different grant.

Original assignee

Alarm.com Incorporated (Alarm.com Holdings, Inc.), a Delaware corporation, 8281 Greensboro Drive, Suite 100, Tysons, VA 22102 — the assignee on the face of the issued patent and the current owner throughout.

• Business: cloud-based smart-home / smart-business platform: interactive security, video monitoring, energy management (EnergyHub), and water management — including sump-pump and water-level monitoring, water sensors, and connected water shut-off valves. The claims here (sump-pump activity + water-level risk threshold → notification; and the applied claim 1 variant that instructs the pump to increase pump speed) read on this shipped Alarm.com product line, so yes, the original assignee ships products embodying the claims.
• Status: Operating. Publicly traded (NASDAQ: ALRM), solvent, filing 10-K/10-Q throughout. It acquired EnergyHub, Inc. (2013) and the iControl Networks assets through its wholly owned subsidiary ICN Acquisition, LLC (patent assignment agreement dated 2017-03-08). Both of those affiliates appear in this patent's security-interest records.
• Assertion posture: Alarm.com is itself an active patent plaintiff against direct competitors — e.g., Alarm.com, Inc. + ICN Acquisition, LLC v. ipDatatel (E.D. Tex., filed 2017-08-24) and v. Protect America / SecureNet (E.D. Va., filed 2017-04-25; refiled E.D. Tex.), plus the earlier iControl v. SecureNet Delaware case. US 9,989,397 is not among the asserted patent numbers I could confirm in those complaints.

Assignment timeline

Recorded entries below are taken from the Google Patents legal-events panel for US 9,989,397. Reel/frame numbers and correspondent-of-record were not exposed by the sources I could reach and I have not fabricated them. Dates shown are recordation dates as indexed; execution dates are noted where the underlying instrument is documented elsewhere.

• Recorded 2017-10-10 — Reel/Frame not verified

  • Conveyance: Security Interest (patent security agreement / collateral lien — "see document for details")
  • Assignor (grantors): Alarm.com, Incorporated; EnergyHub, Inc.; ICN Acquisition, LLC
  • Assignee: Silicon Valley Bank, as administrative agent (2400 Hanover Street, Palo Alto, CA 94304)
  • Correspondent: not verified in this session. Note for context: the predecessor SVB security agreement in this same corporate family was recorded at Reel 032860 / Frame 0969 (recorded 2014-05-09) and released at Reel 033673 / Frame 0347 (2014) — i.e., the lender-side recording is a recurring, routine pattern, not an NPE correspondent.
  • Context: Securitization. Recorded four days after Alarm.com entered the $125.0M "2017 Facility" with SVB (executed 2017-10-06), which refinanced the 2014 Facility. Substantially all Alarm.com assets, including IP, were pledged. This is a lien, not a title transfer.

• Recorded 2018-01-25 — Reel/Frame not verified

  • Conveyance: Assignment of assignor's interest (inventor → company)
  • Assignors: Heffernan, Craig Carl; Qin, Bingying; Goodman, Daniel; Kinney, Abraham Joseph; Williams, Peter Richard
  • Assignee: Alarm.com Incorporated
  • Correspondent: not verified
  • Context: Routine employment assignment. Confirms the inventors' title in the continuation application (filed 2017-07-17) to the company; recorded during pendency, before the 2018-06-05 grant. Not a transfer to a third party.

• Recorded 2021-01-21 — Reel/Frame not verified

  • Conveyance: Release by Secured Party
  • Assignor: Silicon Valley Bank
  • Assignee/released parties: Alarm.com Incorporated; EnergyHub, Inc.; ICN Acquisition, LLC
  • Correspondent: not verified
  • Context: Securitization unwind. SVB discharged its collateral lien — consistent with Alarm.com paying off / replacing the 2017 Facility. Restores the chain to a clean, unencumbered title in Alarm.com.

Net chain: inventors → Alarm.com Incorporated (title), with a lender lien in and out. There is no post-issuance transfer of title to any third party, and no assignment to an entity outside the Alarm.com corporate family. If the Assignment Center shows additional cover sheets beyond these three, they post-date this analysis.

Timeline diagram

timeline
    title Ownership of US 9989397
    2015 : Provisional filed Apr 14
    2017 : Continuation filed Jul 17
         : SVB security interest recorded Oct 10
    2018 : Inventors assign title to Alarm.com Jan 25
         : Patent issued Jun 5
    2021 : SVB releases security interest Jan 21

NPE / troll-pattern signals

1. Shell-entity transfer — not present. The only title assignment is inventors → Alarm.com Incorporated, the operating parent. The co-grantors/co-released parties in the lien records (EnergyHub, Inc.; ICN Acquisition, LLC) are Alarm.com's wholly owned operating subsidiaries (energy platform; iControl asset-acquisition vehicle) — not licensing-only shells. No "IP/Holdings/Ventures/Licensing" entity anywhere in the chain.

2. Known asserter in the chain — not present. No assignee or assignor matches Acacia, Marathon, Intellectual Ventures, IPNav, Wi-LAN, Conversant/Mosaid, Vringo, Pendrell, Round Rock, MPHJ, Lumen View, or any Spangenberg entity. The only third-party institution in the chain is Silicon Valley Bank, a lender taking collateral (Reel-entry dated 2017-10-10), which is not an assertion vehicle.

3. Repeat correspondent across the chain — unclear / not verifiable. Correspondent-of-record is not exposed on the records I could access, so I cannot test for recurrence. One contextual data point: in this corporate family SVB's patent security filings were made through a corporate recording service (the 2014 predecessor documents show a service correspondence address, ipteam@nationalcorp.com, 1025 Vermont Ave NW, Suite 1130, Washington DC) rather than an NPE-linked attorney. No NPE-linked correspondent is evidenced. Single appearance would not be a finding anyway under the recurrence rule.

4. Cascading transfers (<24 months through chained LLCs) — not present. One title transfer and one lien over ~4 years (2017–2021). The 2017-10-10 lien and 2018-01-25 inventor assignment are unrelated events with different functions (collateral vs. title perfection), not a chain of conveyances.

5. Pre-litigation transfer — not present. US 9,989,397 is not identified among the patents Alarm.com asserted against ipDatatel (2017-08-24), Protect America/SecureNet (2017-04-25), or iControl v. SecureNet. No assignment of this patent precedes any suit.

6. Bankruptcy fire-sale — not present. Alarm.com has been a going concern and SEC registrant throughout; no Chapter 7/11 event touching this patent.

7. Privateering — not present. The inverse pattern actually appears: Alarm.com asserts its own patents, and patents held via its wholly owned subsidiary ICN Acquisition, LLC, against direct market competitors. That is operating-company enforcement with full control retained — not a transfer to a third-party NPE to assert on the operating company's behalf.

8. Defensive aggregator (anti-NPE) — not present. Chain does not terminate at RPX, AST, LOT, Unified Patents, or OIN.

Verdict

Operating-company assertion.

Justification: the chain is a single operating company plus a lender's collateral lien — inventors assigned title to Alarm.com Incorporated (recorded 2018-01-25), the patent was pledged to Silicon Valley Bank as part of the $125M "2017 Facility" (recorded 2017-10-10), and SVB released that lien (recorded 2021-01-21), leaving unencumbered title with Alarm.com. Alarm.com is a NASDAQ-listed (ALRM) smart-home platform that ships the claimed water-management/sump-pump monitoring functionality and actively asserts related patents against direct competitors (ipDatatel, Protect America/SecureNet) either itself or via its wholly owned subsidiary ICN Acquisition, LLC — the opposite of an NPE posture. Caveat: US 9,989,397 specifically has not been identified as an asserted patent in the litigation I could review, and the reel/frame numbers and correspondents of record could not be verified from a primary Assignment Center record in this session, so a final reel-level citation should be confirmed directly.

Verification link: https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ (search patent number 9989397; legacy equivalent https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html). Patent record: https://patents.google.com/patent/US9989397/en

Caveat on completeness: three recorded entries are indexed for this patent. If the Assignment Center returns cover sheets whose reel/frame and correspondent I could not retrieve here, treat those fields — not my "not verified" placeholders — as controlling.

I'll research this patent and its cited prior art. Let me start with several targeted searches.

Let me get the actual cited references (the "References Cited" section) for this patent.

Let me try to access the Google Patents and FreePatentsOnline pages directly for the citation list.

Analyst Report — US 9,989,397 ("Water management sensing")

Important transparency note up front: I was able to verify the patent's identity and bibliographic record, but I was not able to retrieve the front‑page (56) "References Cited" table (the examiner/applicant‑cited prior‑art list) from the sources I could reach in this session. Per my operating rules, I will not fabricate that list. Below I separate verified findings from explicitly-flagged uncertainty, and give you the exact next step to pull the authoritative citation list.

A. Patent identity (verified)

Source: Google Patents record — https://patents.google.com/patent/US9989397/en ; FreePatentsOnline — https://www.freepatentsonline.com/[9989397](/patent/9989397).html

Classification (verified): G08B21/20 (status alarms responsive to moisture); G08B21/18; G01F23/00; E03F1/002; E03F5/22; E04B1/70; E04H9/145 (flood protection).

B. Priority chain / patent family (verified from the patent text)

• US 9,989,397 is a continuation of U.S. App. Ser. No. 15/098,564, filed 2016‑04‑14 ("now allowed"), which claims benefit of U.S. Provisional App. Ser. No. 62/147,339, filed 2015‑04‑14, titled "Water Management Sensing." Both are incorporated by reference.
• Assignment recorded 2018‑01‑25 from all five inventors to Alarm.com Incorporated.

Analyst note: Because 9,989,397 is a continuation, the real § 102/§ 103 exposure runs from the 2015‑04‑14 provisional date, not the 2017 filing date. Any prior art dated after 2015‑04‑14 cannot be § 102 art against the claims; art between 2015‑04‑14 and 2016‑04‑14 may only be § 102(a)(2) (secret prior art) or § 102(b)(2) art.

C. Claim scope (from the intrinsic record)

The claims track the abstract and FIG. 4:

• Obtain activity data for a sump pump associated with a property, indicating a present operational status (on/pumping vs. off/not pumping).
• Obtain water level data indicating a level of water within the property (e.g., sump basin).
• Determine that the activity data indicates the sump pump is operating AND that the water level satisfies a water level risk threshold.
• In response, provide a notification that the property is at risk of suffering water damage.
• Dependent/embodied features (description + FIG. 2/3/4): water‑damage susceptibility score and threshold; rain sensor / local precipitation data boosting susceptibility; run‑off characteristics (lot size, grading, roofing, gutters); alert routing based on occupancy; alert to third‑party service provider or vendor/manufacturer; action‑item list entry; sump‑pump utilization (time‑rate volumetric reduction) and reference comparison; neighborhood/community pipe‑burst data from the application server; disabling irrigation / main water valve.

Anticipation point: The independent claim is narrow and essentially "pump ON + water level above a risk threshold → notify of water‑damage risk." That combination (a single processor/panel correlating pump‑run status with an independent high‑water level sensor and issuing a damage/alert notification) is the crux any § 102 reference must disclose in a single reference, arranged as claimed.

D. The (56) "References Cited" list — NOT VERIFIED

I could not confirm the specific U.S./foreign patent documents printed on the face of US 9,989,397. The web searches returned the full specification and the forward‑citation mentions of the patent, but not the (56) citation table. I am therefore not listing any references as "cited on the patent," because doing so would require guessing.

To be clear about what I did find (so you can distinguish it): several search hits showed other patents' citation lists (e.g., WO2007124297A1, WO2001011189A3, US8973324, US11773856, WO2019032424A1). Those references belong to those documents, not to US 9,989,397, and I am deliberately not attributing them to this patent.

Authoritative sources for the real (56) list — pull these directly:

1. USPTO PatentCenter → application 15/651,786 → "References Cited" / "Patent and Non‑Patent References" (the PTO‑217 front page and the IDS/PTO‑1449).
2. Google Patents → https://patents.google.com/patent/US9989397/en → the "Citations" pane is split into Patent citations (the (56) list) vs. Cited by (forward citations).
3. FreePatentsOnline → https://www.freepatentsonline.com/9989397.html → "Referenced Cited" section.
4. USPTO Patent Public Search (ppubs.uspto.gov) and the Global Dossier for the family's foreign counterparts' search reports.

E. Forward citations found (verified — these are NOT prior art)

These are patents/publications that cite US 9,989,397. They post‑date it and therefore cannot be § 102 prior art against it; they are useful only to show how the field developed and who is building on it:

Sources: https://patents.google.com/patent/US20120285895 (citation line for US10315930B2); https://patents.justia.com/patent/[12092506](/patent/12092506) ; https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/9b/ef/5b/6341da73af6e62/US11773856.pdf ; EP3567173A1 search‑report annex.

Relevance of the forward‑citation cluster: US 11,773,856 (State Farm) is the closest thematic neighbor — it claims rise‑rate detection in a sump basin to detect backflow, i.e., it moves downstream of 9,989,397's "pump ON + high water = malfunction" logic. This tells you the actual crowded art field is sump‑pump performance/anomaly monitoring with telemetry, which is exactly where the (56) art is likely concentrated.

F. What I can and cannot say about § 102 anticipation

• I cannot name specific references and map them to individual claims, because I could not verify the (56) list. Naming them would fabricate the record.
• Structurally, any § 102 reference against claim 1 would need to disclose, in a single reference, all of: (a) activity data indicating the pump is currently operating/pumping; (b) a water level measurement; (c) a determination that the level satisfies a risk threshold while the pump runs; and (d) outputting a water‑damage‑risk notification in response.
• The dependent/embodied features (susceptibility score, rain gauge coupling, occupancy‑based multi‑channel alerting, run‑off characteristics, pump‑utilization/reference comparison, neighborhood pipe‑burst correlation, irrigation/main‑valve shutdown) are the more distinctive limitations and are where non‑obviousness (§ 103) arguments would likely have been made.

G. Recommended next step

If you need the actual anticipation analysis with named references, share or authorize a pull of the (56) Citations panel from Google Patents / the USPTO PatentCenter "References Cited" tab for application 15/651,786. With that list in hand I can, for each reference, give you: full citation, publication/filing date, a brief description, and the specific claim(s) it potentially anticipates under 35 U.S.C. § 102 — grounded in the reference's own text rather than inference.

Prepared 2026‑04‑26. All patent identifiers are reported exactly as found; none have been auto‑corrected. Where I lacked high‑confidence source data (the (56) citation list), I have said so explicitly rather than supplying unverified citations.

I'll research prior art references relevant to the '397 claims before building the obviousness analysis.

Let me pull the actual claims of the '397 patent and its cited prior art.

Obviousness Analysis — US 9,989,397 B1 under 35 U.S.C. § 103

Analyst note on the record / caveat carried forward. As flagged in the earlier summary sections, the full-text copy of the '397 patent supplied to me is truncated in the FIG. 4 discussion and does not contain a verbatim "What is claimed is" set. The Google Patents page as fetched also does not include an explicit "References Cited" / prior-art list (the scrape jumps from the classification table to the "Definitions" and family/landscape data). So "the Prior Art section of this page" is effectively absent as a discrete list. I therefore build this § 103 analysis on (a) the claim scope that is authoritatively derivable from the '397 abstract and FIG. 4 steps 410–440, and (b) prior art surfaced by search that is unambiguously pre-dating the '397 priority date of April 14, 2015. Where a reference's critical date is uncertain, I say so. I do not represent verbatim claim numbers.

1. The claim scope being tested (as derivable)

From the abstract and FIG. 4, the independent claim(s) of '397 (system / method / non-transitory CRM triad) reduce to this elemental core:

Notably, the claim is a logical AND of two pre-existing binary signals (pump-on signal, high-water signal) followed by a conventional alert. That framing matters enormously to the § 103 analysis: each input, the ANDing logic, and the alert were all independently known in the sump-pump/flood-protection art decades before 2015.

POSITA. A person having ordinary skill would be a controls/embedded-systems engineer (or an alarm-industry systems engineer) with ~2–3 years' experience in residential water-management or security monitoring, familiar with float switches, conductivity probes, current/power sensing, and networked alarm panels. This is a low-skill, highly predictable art.

2. Reference inventory (with critical dates)

Deleted-from-consideration (post-date) art: US 2020/0248698 A1 (use-condition signatures), US 2019/0101427 A1 (PumpSpy-type power monitor), US 2023/0074197 A1, US 2024/0003351 A1, US 12,529,370 B2, and the PumpSpy/Drycrete commercial apps — all post-date the '397 priority and cannot be § 102/§ 103 art against '397. I mention them only because search results conflate them with the '397 family.

3. Primary obviousness combination — Janesky '313 in view of Niedermeyer '427 (and the pump-current-sensing art)

3.1 What each reference lacks alone

• Janesky alone discloses (b), (c-ii) and (d) — a probe whose closing at a level above the pump-actuation level is, in claim terms, a "water level risk threshold," and an alarm. But Janesky's alarm fires on high water regardless of whether the pump is running; it does not consume "activity data indicating a present operational status." So Janesky alone does not reach element (a) or the full (c) AND condition.
• Niedermeyer alone discloses (a) — monitoring the pump's operation — but not the water-level-risk-threshold AND notification logic.

3.2 The combination covers every element

Combine them in the ordinary way (both mount on the same sump installation and feed a common control module — Janesky already shows a wall-mounted alarm enclosure wired to the sump; Niedermeyer shows a pump monitor wired to the pump circuit):

• (a) Niedermeyer's pump monitor supplies the present operational status of the pump (pumping / not pumping).
• (b) Janesky's probe supplies the water level.
• (c) The control circuitry performs the AND: pump operating and water at/above the probe's above-actuation level.
• (d) Janesky's alarm module (or its "connector 25 for remotely signaling the high water condition") provides the notification.

3.3 Motivation to combine — this is the strongest part of the case

The motivation is not merely generic; it is stated in Janesky's own specification. Janesky enumerates the very failure modes that the '397 patent was written to distinguish:

"[I]f the pump fails, is accidentally unplugged, the circuit breaker is tripped, or if the discharge conduit freezes or becomes plugged, the water level can rise in the pump enclosure…"

"Discharge conduit frozen/plugged" and "defective pump" are exactly the failure modes in which the pump is running but cannot move water — the '397 patent's stated problem ("a sump pump may be underpowered or malfunctioning so that while the sump pump is turned on, the water level in the sump basin continues to rise"). A POSITA reading Janesky would immediately recognize that a high-water alarm alone cannot tell the homeowner which of these causes applies, and the natural, predictable improvement is to add the pump-operation signal so the system can discriminate:

• high water + pump off → power loss / float-switch failure / dead pump;
• high water + pump on → clogged/frozen discharge, underpowered or failing pump — the '397 scenario.

This yields a concrete, predictable benefit: fewer false/ambiguous alarms and correctly-routed remediation (electrician vs. plumber), and the ability to escalate urgency. That is a classic KSR rationale — "the improvement is nothing more than the predictable use of prior-art elements according to their established functions" — and specifically fits KSR rationales (a) known elements combined by known methods, (c) known technique to improve a similar device in the same way, and (f) "obvious to try" among a finite number of predictable, identifiable options (there are only a handful of meaningful sensor inputs to a sump: pump on/off, water level, overflow, current).

3.4 Result

Independent claim (a)–(d) would have been obvious over Janesky + Niedermeyer. The "invention," reduced to essentials, is: take two alarms that already existed in the same sump pit, feed them to one controller, and require both to be asserted before notifying. That is an obvious logical combination, and KSR forecloses the argument that mere aggregation of two known signals is patentable where the combination performs no more than a predictable, expected function.

Alternative primary combination (belt-and-suspenders): Janesky + the current-probe/float module of US 2015/0143894 A1 / US 9,709,054 (subject to the date verification above), in which the same reference already carries both the high-water float module and the pump-current module to a shared control module — making the combination nearly a single-reference anticipation-adjacent case, and at minimum an obviousness case with an even shorter inferential leap.

4. Dependent-claim features — secondary obviousness combinations

(Framed as "likely dependent claims" per the earlier scope caveat — these features appear in the '397 specification and in search-surfaced claim language that I could not attribute to '397 with certainty versus its family. If they are in fact claimed, each is separately obvious.)

5. Anticipated counterarguments and their weaknesses

1. "The references are non-analogous." Unlikely to succeed — Janesky, Niedermeyer, Apfelbaum and Payne are all in the same field (sump-pump / water-control flood protection). This is the paradigmatic analogous-art situation.
2. "Teaching away." Janesky arguably teaches a battery-powered, independent alarm intended to work even when house power fails; one could argue that integrating with a pump-operation monitor touches the pump's circuit. But this is weak: Janesky's own module already interfaces with the pump installation and provides dry contacts to an external alarm system, and Niedermeyer's whole purpose is to monitor the pump circuit. No reference disparages the combination, so there is no genuine teaching away.
3. "Unexpected results / secondary considerations." Expect the strongest non-obviousness argument to be commercial success / industry praise of the Alarm.com product and any nexus to the ON+HIGH-water alert. But (a) the arguably novel bit per the abstract is the ANDed two-signal logic, which the prior art renders obvious; and (b) any success would need to be shown to flow from that specific logic rather than from Alarm.com's integration, brand, and monitoring service. Long-felt need could be asserted, but the "need" (distinguishing why the pump failed) was already recognized by Janesky in 1993, which undercuts a long-felt-need narrative.
4. "Missing claim text." Procedurally, the strongest defense is definitional: argue that a dependent claim recites specific threshold-derivation or scoring mechanics (weather data, irrigation data, susceptibility score) that the examiner did not squarely map. This is why confirming the verbatim granted claims from USPTO Patent Center / Patent Public Search is essential — it is the single highest-value verification step.

6. Bottom line

• Independent claim (a)–(d) of US 9,989,397 is vulnerable under § 103 over US 5,314,313 (Janesky) in view of US 4,228,427 (Niedermeyer) — and, with even less inferential distance, over the pump-current-plus-high-water module system of US 2015/0143894 A1 / US 9,709,054 (date to be confirmed). The claim is a logical AND of two independently old sump signals plus a conventional notification.
• The decisive motivation is intrinsic to Janesky: its specification already lists "activated pump unable to pump" / "discharge conduit frozen or plugged" as failure modes, which supplies the reason to add a pump-operation sensor to discriminate causes — precisely the '397 use case.
• Dependent features (weather-adjusted threshold, susceptibility score, occupancy routing, service dispatch, utilization/performance reporting, community data) are each independently obvious as routine parameterization, data aggregation, or known alarm-industry functionality.
• Caveats: (i) the verbatim granted claims were not available in the supplied material and should be pulled from Patent Public Search for 9,989,397; (ii) the US 2015/0143894 A1 / 9,709,054 critical date must be verified in the file wrapper before it is used as a primary reference; (iii) US 9,709,431 is the same-family sibling and is not available as prior art.