US 10254265

I'll search for authoritative information on this patent number, including any litigation activity.

Let me check for any litigation or assignment records specifically tied to this patent number.

Let me pull the actual claim text to accurately summarize the independent claims.

US Patent 10,254,265 — Analyst Summary

Search scope note: I queried for this exact number against surfaced USPTO/PTAB, Justia, Google Patents, CourtListener, and Federal Circuit opinion/docket materials. I found no litigation or CAFC appeal involving US 10,254,265. Several hits contained a "265" but are different patents (e.g., U.S. 9,629,265 CloudByte v. Dell; U.S. 10,258,265 Masimo v. Apple; U.S. 9,482,632 NEC; Yukon Packaging's '264/'265/'562) — I have not conflated those with this patent. I also saw a German priority document "DE 10254265" (Symrise) which is unrelated to a US patent number.

Bibliographic data

Abstract (verbatim)

"A system for managing and monitoring a small or large collection of sealed containers, such as wine bottles, barrels, medicine containers, or bags, as well as individual grapes, batches of must, and other liquids, whose contents may be volatile and difficult to access without destroying the seal and the contents or risking contamination of the liquid. The system performs automated monitoring tasks by communicating with specially manufactured bottles or traditional bottles that have had a sensor installed. Sensor installation can be accomplished with unmodified commercial available equipment."

Independent claims — plain-language overview

Uncertainty flag: I did not retrieve a clean, verbatim, full set of issued claims from an authoritative source. The descriptions below are reconstructed from claim text surfaced on Justia plus the specification. Claim 1's exact preamble language and the total claim count should be treated as unverified.

Claim 1 — System (independent).
Directed to a wine-bottle (or sealed-container) monitoring system, apparently comprising: a sensor body; a probe extending from the body with a tip that pierces the container seal; a processor, memory, and a wireless communication device (e.g., Bluetooth/Wi-Fi); and a user device with a display and user input. The sensor processor is configured to generate a set of sensor data comprising a set of wine characteristics (e.g., dissolved oxygen, acetic acid, alcohol content, sugar, pH, tannin, sulfur dioxide, phenol), wirelessly transmit that data to the user device, compare it against comparison data, and generate a user alert based on the comparison. Dependent claims 2–12 build on this (see below).

Claim 13 — Apparatus (independent).
Directed to the physical probe/sensor hardware rather than the monitoring software flow. It recites:

• (a) a probe needle with a probe casing, a probe tip having at least one tip opening, and a base;
• (b) a capillary (inner sensor cylinder) with an inner sensor tip bearing a porous membrane, seated inside the probe casing, with first and second seals creating a vacuum between them within the casing;
• (c) a sensor wire cylinder inside the capillary containing a measuring sensor electrode extending toward the membrane and a reference electrode, with the remainder of the capillary holding an electrolyte solution;
• (d) a sensor body with a base receiver, processor, memory, and sensor input; and
• (e) a second probe needle with a second base;
• wherein the base couples to the base receiver to connect the sensor output to the sensor input, and the signal from the sensor electrode is transmitted to the processor/memory.

Dependent claims of note (all depend from claim 1)

• Claim 8: low-power/sleep mode logic — disable wireless device, hold for a user-configured time, then wake and transmit only when enabled.
• Claim 9: sensor body sized (~0.9375 in diameter) to fit a cork holder of an unmodified bottle corking device, so the corker drives the probe through the cork.
• Claim 10: posting the bottle for sale to a remote marketplace with description, price, and sensor data.
• Claim 11: fraud detection — compare first/second-period liquid measurements; if change exceeds a fraud threshold, notify a remote server that contents were suspiciously altered.
• Claim 12: improper-storage detection over a period of at least one year using storage thresholds.
• Several claims cover spoilage alerts, comparing two bottles for dissimilarity, and matching user-defined optimal/preference measurements.

Practical points

• The specification frames the invention broadly — wine is the lead example, but it expressly extends to liquid medicines/vaccines, perfumes, barrels, bags, and even standalone measurement of grapes and "must."
• The core technical hook is installing micro-sensors through an intact cork without breaking the seal, using unmodified commercial corking equipment.
• Claim 13 is the hardware-centric independent claim (vacuum-sealed probe needle with capillary/electrolyte electrochemical cell), which is distinct from claim 1's system/software focus.

Caveats: (1) No active or historical litigation, PTAB proceeding, or CAFC 2026 docket was found for this patent number — absence of results is not proof of absence. (2) Assignee status is reported as "Individual"; I found no assignment record confirming a corporate owner. (3) The claim summaries are reconstructions and should be verified against the granted claim set on USPTO PatentCenter/Patent Public Search before being relied upon.

I'll search for litigation involving US patent 10254265 across patent litigation sources.

Let me search more targeted litigation databases.

Let me check litigation-specific databases directly.

Litigation Search Results: US Patent 10,254,265

Patent identified (literal reading): US 10,254,265 B1 — "Sealed container sensor device." Inventor: Mohsen Rezayat. Assignee: Individual. Application No. 15/093,109; filed 2016-04-07; granted 2019-04-09; priority date 2015-04-10 (provisional 62/145,672). This is the correct patent — do not confuse it with the different-format identifiers that appeared in search noise (see note below).

Finding: No litigation known

Based on my searches of patent-litigation resources (Google Patents' litigation links, Justia, Unified Patents-style aggregations, CourtListener/recap references, and Docket Alarm references), I found no record of any litigation — district court or PTAB — involving US 10,254,265.

Specifically:

• No district court cases (no D. Del., E.D. Va., N.D. Cal., E.D. Tex., etc.) naming US 10,254,265 as an asserted patent were located.
• No PTAB proceedings (IPR/PGR/CBM) challenging US 10,254,265 were located.
• No CAFC appeals referencing this patent were located.

Because no case exists, I cannot provide plaintiff(s), defendant(s), jurisdiction, case number, filing date, or outcome — there are none to report.

Important caveats and how I searched

1. The patent appears to be held by an individual inventor (Mohsen Rezayat), not a large portfolio holder. The Google Patents record lists "Individual" as current and original assignee. Patents held by individual inventors with no corporate enforcement campaign frequently have no litigation history, which is consistent with what I found.

2. A related family member exists: US 10,371,684 B1 (application 16/278,401), which the Google Patents record shows as claiming priority to the 15/093,109 application. I did not find litigation on that patent either.

3. Do not be misled by near-matching identifiers in search results. My searches returned several unrelated hits for numbers that superficially resemble the target but are different identifiers:

   • DE 10254265 A1 (German) — "2-Heptylcyclopropyl-1-carboxylic acid" (Symrise GmbH). This is a German application number, not US 10,254,265, and is chemically unrelated.
   • Various other "-542," "-265," and "10254265" fragments in unrelated patent-office documents.

   Per the strict rule, I have not auto-corrected or merged these; they are distinct from US Patent 10,254,265.

Recommend verification for a definitive answer

My search tools are limited and cannot guarantee completeness of litigation coverage. Before relying on a "no litigation" conclusion, verify against paywalled/authoritative dockets:

• Unified Patents litigation portal — https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/litigation/caselist (search "10254265")
• PACER / CourtListener RECAP — https://www.courtlistener.com (search the patent number and "Rezayat")
• USPTO Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) — https://ptacts.uspto.gov (search for IPRs against 10,254,265)
• USPTO PatentCenter assignment history — to confirm current ownership and any transfers that might precede enforcement.

Bottom line: On the evidence available, there is no known litigation involving US Patent 10,254,265. I state this with the caveat that I could not fully exhaust paywalled dockets.

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

Let me run a few more targeted checks before concluding.

One more check for any district court or CAFC activity that could reflect a PTAB track.

PTAB Proceedings — US 10,254,265 B1 ("Sealed Container Sensor Device")

Verification note: The canonical "PTAB proceedings on file" block states that the USPTO Open Data Portal (ODP) AIA trial API returns no proceedings for this patent as of the most recent ingest. My independent web checks (PTAB E2E/PTActs document search, Google Patents' post-grant-proceeding tab, and general IPR/litigation queries keyed to the patent number, title, and inventor name) surfaced nothing further — no IPR, PGR, or CBM papers, and no Federal Circuit opinion referencing US 10,254,265 or its continuation US 10,371,684. I therefore report zero AIA trials, and I flag that as a verified absence rather than an assumption.

Proceedings overview

Total AIA trial proceedings on file: 0 — 0 active, 0 with claims invalidated, 0 with claims sustained, 0 settled, 0 with institution denied. Because no petition has ever been instituted, no claim of US 10,254,265 has been canceled or narrowed by the PTAB, and the patent reaches a defendant today in exactly the claim set that issued on 2019-04-09. The bottom-line defensive posture is therefore the opposite of a "hardened" patent: this is an untested patent with no PTAB record — which cuts both ways. There is no claim you can point to as already dead, no FWD to quote, and no § 315(e)(2) estoppel to leverage against the patent owner; but there is also no established PTAB precedent blessing the claim construction, no institutional track record, and no roadmap of what a panel found persuasive. Any IPR you file would be a first-impression challenge on an issued 2015-priority patent whose claims are drawn largely to a sensor-equipped closure and to methods of manufacture.

One structural consequence worth noting up front: this patent's earliest priority date is 2015-04-10, and it issued 2019-04-09. The nine-month PGR window under § 321(c) closed 2020-01-09, and CBM review is unavailable both because the claims are not directed to a "financial product or service" and because the CBM program sunset under § 18 of the AIA. Inter partes review is the only AIA vehicle still open to a challenger.

No proceedings to enumerate

There are no proceeding numbers, petitioner identities, panels, or dispositions to report, and I will not invent any. The table below records the absence explicitly:

Strategic summary

Claim status across the patent. Every claim of US 10,254,265 is UNTESTED — none canceled, none confirmed, none amended. The issued claim set stands as granted, and the patent is recorded as Active with an adjusted expiration of 2036-12-24 (reflecting the priority date plus PTA), so this is a long-dated right with roughly a decade of runway. For a defendant, the practical point is that you cannot write off any asserted claim as dead: there is no FWD cancelling claim 1, no certificate of correction removing claims, and nothing to cite for the proposition that the patent owner already lost these claims. Conversely, the patent owner has never had to defend a single claim in a contested forum, so its infringement positions are likewise untested against a serious validity challenge.

Estoppel landscape. Section 315(e)(2) estoppel is a non-issue here: it attaches only to grounds a petitioner raised or reasonably could have raised in an IPR that was instituted and reached a final written decision. With zero instituted proceedings, no party is estopped from anything, and there is no petitioner-privity chain that would taint your invalidity case. Practically, that means the entire universe of prior art remains available to you — § 102 anticipation, § 103 obviousness, and § 112 written-description/enablement theories — subject only to the ordinary IPR limits of § 311(b) (patents and printed publications only; no system-art or public-use grounds in an IPR). If you also want to run system-art, prior public use, or on-sale theories, those must go to the district court or be raised in the ITC, not the PTAB.

Pattern signals. There is no pattern to read: no repeat petitioner, no defensive aggregator such as Unified Patents or RPX in the chain, and no patent-owner appeal activity. The assignee of record is an individual (inventor Mohsen Rezayat), not an operating company or a known monetization vehicle — a profile that historically correlates with lower assertion volume, though that is a generalization and not a conclusion about this particular holder. The application also spawned a continuation, US 10,371,684 B1 (priority claim recorded 2019-02-18, granted 2019-08-06), which likewise shows no PTAB activity. If you are evaluating exposure to this family, treat the two patents as a unit — a validity win on one does not automatically dispose of the other, but the specifications overlap heavily.

Recommended next steps

• Treat the absence as the headline finding. Restate it in your file: "USPTO ODP AIA trial data and independent PTAB E2E/PTActs searching show no IPR, PGR, or CBM proceeding against US 10,254,265 or US 10,371,684." Confirm it yourself against USPTO PTAB E2E and the patent's Google Patents page (Post-Grant Proceedings tab) before relying on it, since ODP ingest lags and a petition filed in the last ~90 days may not yet be indexed. If you find a newly filed petition, that changes the analysis — particularly if it precedes your own service date, because a first-filed petition by another party can raise discretionary-denial dynamics under Fintiv-style considerations even after the USPTO's 2025 rescission of the interim Fintiv procedure.

• Because nothing is invalidated, your leverage is prospective, not retrospective. There is no FWD to link or quote. Build your invalidity case from scratch: (1) run a full prior-art search on sensor-in-closure and pierceable-probe architectures, since the 2015 priority date predates the recent surge in smart-bottle and NFC-tag closures; (2) focus on the narrow, structurally specific limitations — the sealed inner vacuum (826) about the inner sensor cylinder, the electrolyte-filled inner sensor cylinder (818) with a porous/perforated membrane (814), the etched-and-gold-plated microelectrode (820), and the screw-base probe-to-sensor-input interface (856/858) — because broad "sensor on a bottle" concepts are likely to be easy to anticipate, while the manufacturing-flow claims (FIGS. 21–25, incl. the three-stage capillary pull to a 10–20 µm tip, KCN etching, and silanization steps) may be where the durability lies.

• Watch the § 315(b) clock. If you have been served with a complaint alleging infringement of this patent, you have one year from service to file an IPR petition or forfeit the right. With no prior petitioner in the field, a timely IPR is fully available to you, and there is no estoppel or Fintiv baggage from an earlier-filed challenge.

• Also screen the § 112 exposure. This specification is unusually thin on claim support in places — the claims recite structural elements (e.g., the inner vacuum, the specific sealed-cylinder geometry) that are described in prose but with limited dimensional and material guidance. A written-description/enablement attack on the broader claims may be available in district court (IPR cannot reach § 112), and it is worth an early claim-construction position on the terms "sealed," "inner sensor cylinder," and "sensor membrane" to set up both a validity and a non-infringement story.

• Confidence caveat. I have high confidence in the zero-proceedings finding for ODP-indexed data. I have moderate confidence that nothing exists outside ODP's index, given that multiple differently-phrased searches (by patent number, title, and inventor) returned no PTAB papers. I did not exhaustively search district court dockets for an underlying infringement suit, which is the typical predicate for an IPR; the absence of PTAB activity is consistent with this patent never having been asserted in a way that triggered a validity challenge.

I'll research the assignment record and ownership chain for US 10,254,265.

I've gathered what's available. Note: my tooling cannot directly render the Assignment Center UI (it's a JS-driven search app), so I rely on indexed records, Google Patents legal events, and corroborating sources. No reel/frame entries surfaced. Here is the analysis.

Assignment & Ownership Reconstruction — US 10,254,265

Patent: US 10,254,265 B1 — "Sealed container sensor device"
Application: 15/093,109 · filed 2016-04-07 · granted 2019-04-09 · priority 2015-04-10 (Prov. 62/145,672)
Family member: US 10,371,684 B1 (app. 16/278,401, filed 2019-02-18)

Contradiction flag: The task instructions say to "stop after this section" if there are no assignment records, but the required output format also mandates a timeline diagram, signals, and a verdict — and the verdict menu explicitly contemplates "no records, or only the original assignment." I treat the two as reconcilable: I proceed through all sections only to the extent of documenting the absence of records. No assignments are fabricated. I also could not query the Assignment Center UI directly this session, so the "no records" finding is stated with the sourcing caveats below rather than as a certified docket pull.

Inventors

• Mohsen Rezayat — sole named inventor (confirmed on the face of the patent and in Google Patents / Justia metadata).
  • Employer at time of filing: Not determinable from the patent record. The application was filed and prosecuted as an individual, with no employer-assignee named anywhere in the priority chain. There is no recorded assignment to a company (see below).
  • Public-profile caveat: A "Mohsen Rezayat" is publicly known as a long-time scientist/engineer in the CAD/PLM software field (associated with Siemens PLM Software / Siemens Digital Industries Software). I could not verify in this session that the inventor is the same person, and regardless, the subject matter here (wine-bottle micro-sensors) is unrelated to CAD/PLM, which is consistent with a personal side-project filing rather than a corporate invention. Treated as unconfirmed.
  • Unusual-pattern note: There is no assignee to "depart" from — the inventor filed personally and (apparently) retained ownership. The classic "all inventors depart the original assignee within 12 months" precursor does not apply, because there was never a corporate assignee.

Original assignee

• Named on the issued patent: Individual (i.e., the inventor himself). Google Patents lists the original assignee and current assignee both as "Individual" (no "Assigned to …" legal events appear).
• Product shipping status: No evidence that the individual, or any entity he controls, has shipped a commercial product embodying the claims. The specification reads as a concept/prototype disclosure (manufacturing flows for oxygen and pH micro-electrodes, corker-based installation). No product brand, retailer listing, or commercialization was surfaced.
• Primary line of business: N/A — individual inventor, not an operating company.
• Current status: N/A — no corporate entity in the chain to be operating, acquired, dissolved, or bankrupt. (The related patent US 10,371,684 remains in the same individual-ownership posture.)

Assignment timeline

Finding: No recorded assignments for US 10,254,265 were located, and none appear in the patent's legal-events record.

• The application was filed as an individual filing (inventor = applicant). A filing by the inventor-as-applicant typically requires no assignment to be recorded, which is the most likely explanation for the empty record.
• No Assignment Center / reel-frame entries, no Security Agreement, no Merger, no Change of Name, no License, and no Release appear in the indexed records I could reach (Google Patents legal events; Justia; general web indexes).
• No correspondent of record for any recording exists — because there are no recordings to carry a correspondent. (The recurring-correspondent signal is therefore not just absent; it is inapplicable.)
• Caveat / recommended verification: Because I could not directly drive the Assignment Center search app this session, the definitive "empty" pull should be confirmed at the source:
  • USPTO Assignment Center — https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/
  • Legacy Assignment Search — https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html (search "10254265" or "15/093,109")
  • PatentCenter — https://patentcenter.uspto.gov/ (assignment tab for 15/093,109)

Timeline diagram

Only filing and issuance events are documented; there are no ownership-transfer events to plot.

timeline
    title Ownership of US 10254265
    2015 : Provisional filed by Mohsen Rezayat
    2016 : Non-provisional filed as individual
    2019 : Patent issued to inventor
         : Continuation filed 16278401
    2019 : Continuation issued as US10371684

NPE / troll-pattern signals

Corroborating context from the prior (litigation) section, which found no district-court case, no PTAB proceeding, and no CAFC appeal naming US 10,254,265 — consistent with a dormant, individually-held patent that has never been asserted.

Verdict

Insufficient data — only the original (individual) ownership is on record; no post-issuance assignments exist to analyze.

Justification: The patent was filed by and issued to Mohsen Rezayat as an individual, with "Individual" listed as both original and current assignee and no reel/frame assignment entries located. With zero transfers in the chain, every NPE-pattern signal is either not present or inapplicable, and the companion research found no litigation to anchor a pre-litigation-transfer theory. This is the ordinary profile of a never-assigned, individually-held inventor patent — not a troll structure, but also not an operating-company assertion.

Verification links:

• Assignment Center — https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/ (search 10254265)
• Legacy Assignment Search — https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html
• PatentCenter (app. 15/093,109) — https://patentcenter.uspto.gov/
• Google Patents (legal events) — https://patents.google.com/patent/[US10254265B1](/patent/US10254265B1)/en
• Family member — https://patents.google.com/patent/[US10371684B1](/patent/US10371684B1)/en

Confidence note: The "no assignments" conclusion is high-confidence on the indexed/documented record, but medium-confidence as an exhaustive finding, because the Assignment Center UI could not be queried directly in this session and no reel/frame was independently confirmed. A definitive pull should be run against the three USPTO links above.

I'll search for the specific patent number and its cited prior art references.

Let me look for the actual front-page references cited on this patent.

Let me pull the full Justia reference list and the Google Patents citation data.

I hit my tool-call limit while drilling into the reference-by-reference bibliographic details, so I'm reporting what I could verify and flagging precisely what I could not. I did not want to fabricate titles, assignees, or filing dates that the searches did not return.

US 10,254,265 — Prior-Art / Cited-Reference Analysis

1. Patent identity (confirmed literal match)

• US 10,254,265 B1, "Sealed container sensor device," inventor Mohsen Rezayat (Cincinnati, OH), assignee Individual.
• Application 15/093,109, filed 2016-04-07, granted 2019-04-09, earliest priority 2015-04-10 (provisional 62/145,672).
• Classifications G01N33/146 (beverages containing alcohol), G01N33/143 (beverages containing sugar), H04W88/02, H04W8/005.
• This is a B1 grant (no pre-grant publication), consistent with the path above.

I did not conflate this with the German document DE 10254265 (Symrise, 2-heptylcyclopropyl-1-carboxylic acid) or any “-542,” “-265,” or “1025…265” fragments surfaced in search noise.

2. Important scope limitation on this task

What I could NOT retrieve: the applicant’s Information Disclosure Statement (IDS) as a document, the examiner’s cited-reference list separately from the applicant’s, any Notice of Allowance / Office Action, or the titles, filing dates, and assignees for the cited publications. My tools returned the front-page “Referenced Cited” table (via the Justia record) but not the underlying PDFs. Under the operating rules, I am not going to invent titles or dates I did not observe.

Authoritative next step: the granted claims and the complete front-page reference list appear on the USPTO’s own Patent Public Search / PatentCenter record for 15/093,109, and the references’ own bibliographic data should be pulled from each publication’s front page (or Google Patents/Espacenet). That is the reliable way to close the gaps flagged below.

3. Cited references of record (U.S. Patent Documents)

Per the Justia front-page record (https://patents.justia.com/patent/10254265), the “Referenced Cited — U.S. Patent Documents” list is:

Status flags on this list:

• I could not independently confirm whether these eight are the complete set of references cited, or whether the list includes foreign patent documents / non-patent literature that simply did not surface. Treat the table as the list as reported, completeness unverified.
• Titles, application/filing dates, assignees, and cited passages/specification paragraphs are NOT retrieved — I will not guess them. Full citation format (“US 2005/0190070 A1, published Sep 1, 2005”) is as listed; the content of each reference is unverified here.
• Several of these are pre-AIA and post-AIA application publications, and each must be date-qualified against the 2015-04-10 / 2016-04-07 critical dates to determine whether it is §102(a), §102(b), §102(a)(1), or §102(a)(2) art. See caveat in §5.

4. Claim-mapping framework for §102

Because I could not verify the disclosures of the eight references, I cannot assign a confident anticipatory mapping. What I can do is lay out the claim targets that make each reference-check productive — i.e., the specific claim language a §102 analysis must match against each reference’s actual text:

Independent claims and their §102 “anticipation targets:”

• Claim 1 (system): requires, in combination — a sensor body; a probe with a tip that pierces the container seal; processor + memory + wireless communication device; and a user device with display and user input — with the processor configured to (i) generate a set of wine characteristics (e.g., dissolved oxygen, acetic acid, alcohol, sugar, pH, tannin, SO₂, phenol), (ii) wirelessly transmit to the user device, (iii) compare against comparison data, and (iv) generate a user alert on the comparison. A §102 reference would need all of these in a single embodiment.
• Claim 13 (apparatus): the hardware claim — probe needle casing/tip with tip opening; a capillary with a porous membrane at the inner sensor tip; first and second seals creating a vacuum in the casing; a sensor wire cylinder with a measuring electrode and a reference electrode; electrolyte solution in the capillary remainder; a sensor body with base receiver/processor/memory/sensor input; and a second probe needle coupling via its base. Anticipation here would require a reference disclosing the vacuum-sealed, dual-electrode electrochemical micro-probe architecture — a demanding match.
• Claim 15 (method) and claim 16 (dependent) — the Justia record quotes “16. The method of claim 15, wherein the liquid is selected from the group consisting of: (a) a wine, wherein the container is a sealed container…”. This is a refinement to my earlier summary, which had flagged the claim count as unverified: there is a method independent claim (15) in addition to claims 1 and 13, meaning the earlier “claims 1–12 + 13” characterization was incomplete. The exact total claim count still should be verified.

Dependent-claim targets most likely to attract prior-art citation (claims 2–12):

Any of the eight cited publications that discloses wine-quality sensing, a pierce-the-cork probe, wireless sensor reporting, or threshold-based alerting could bear on these dependent claims; I cannot say which without their texts.

5. Direct answer to “which claims could be anticipated”

I cannot responsibly name a specific anticipating claim/reference pair from the data I retrieved, because anticipation under §102 requires that a single reference disclose every element of the claim as arranged — and I was unable to verify the disclosure content of the eight cited publications. Stating otherwise would be fabrication.

What I can state with confidence:

1. The front-page-cited U.S. references are the eight publications in §3, and those are the references the examiner/applicant put of record.
2. The most likely §102 battleground is claim 1 vs. a wine/beverage-sensor-plus-wireless-alert publication (e.g., among Rubenstein, Rudduck, Larimer, Susko, Schneider, Gurumohan) — hypothesis, not a finding.
3. Claim 13’s vacuum-sealed dual-electrode micro-probe is the hardest element to anticipate from typical wine-labeling/software art, so if any asserted §102 reference exists it is more likely aimed at the system/software claims than at the apparatus claim.
4. The subject-matter match to G01N33/146 and the claim-1 “wine characteristics” list means the examiner’s real prior art is likely wine-analysis and sensor-tag literature; I did not verify which of the eight references are in that space.

6. Date/§102-qualification caveat (important)

The eight references span 2001 to 2015 publication dates. The patent’s earliest priority is 2015-04-10 and its filing is 2016-04-07. Determining whether each is §102(a)/(b) (pre-AIA) or §102(a)(1)/(a)(2) (AIA) art requires the reference’s effective filing date, which I did not retrieve. Note in particular the two 2015 publications (Schneider, Nov 19, 2015; Gurumohan, Dec 10, 2015) — if their publication dates are after the 2015-04-10 priority date, they can only be §102(a)(2) art (via their own earlier effective filing dates), which is precisely the qualification I could not verify.

7. Recommended verification steps (to make this analysis reliable)

1. USPTO Patent Public Search / PatentCenter, application 15/093,109 — pull the granted claims (verbatim, to fix the claim count and confirm claims 15–16) and the complete list of references cited, distinguishing applicant IDS citations from examiner citations.
2. For each of the eight publications, pull the front page (title, inventor, assignee, filing date, effective filing date, cited passages) from Google Patents or Espacenet.
3. Then perform the element-by-element §102 comparison against claim 1 and claim 13 — the two independent claims where anticipation is legally meaningful.
4. Confirm the family member US 10,371,684 B1 (app. 16/278,401) shares this reference list, since related-family citations often overlap.

Bottom line: I confirmed the literal patent identity and the eight U.S. patent-document citations of record, gave the full citation/date/inventor for each as reported, and identified the claim elements a §102 analysis must match. I could not retrieve the references’ titles or disclosures, so I have not asserted any specific reference-to-claim anticipation — that determination requires the reference texts, which should be pulled from the USPTO/front pages as outlined above.

I'll research the prior art references cited against (and relevant to) US 10,254,265 to ground the § 103 analysis.

Let me retrieve the specific prior-art citations listed on the patent's Google Patents page.

I found the verbatim claim text and several key prior-art candidates. Let me now pull the specific citation table and identify the most relevant references with their dates.

I've hit the tool-call limit, so I'll write the analysis from the prior-art material I retrieved. Two important source notes before the analysis.

§ 103 Obviousness Analysis — US 10,254,265 B1 ("Sealed Container Sensor Device")

0. Source provenance, and one contradiction with the earlier-generated sections (flagged per instructions)

What I retrieved this round: (a) verbatim claim 1 and claim 13 from an RPX Insight record, plus supplementary claim 15 text; and (b) a set of prior-art references surfaced via citation networks, Google Patents citation snippets, and the technical literature that the patent's own manufacturing disclosure tracks. I did not obtain the patent's full 55-item examiner citation table (PTO‑892) or the file-wrapper rejections. So the references below are of two kinds — (i) items that appear to be of record/cited on the patent, and (ii) closely related art I located through citation linkage. I flag which is which.

⚠️ Contradiction to flag explicitly. The previously-generated "Independent claims — plain-language overview" described claim 1 as reciting "a set of wine characteristics," a "comparison" against "comparison data," and generation of "a user alert." The verbatim claim 1 I retrieved this round does not recite wine at all, nor comparison data, nor an alert. Claim 1 is a hardware/system claim (sensor body + probe with tip chamber/sensor intake/capillary + user device + micro-sensor with measuring sensor and reference electrode + cork-piercing with seal maintained). The comparison/alert features appear to live in dependent claims. The earlier "Claim 13" summary (vacuum-sealed probe needle, capillary, electrolyte cell) matches the verbatim claim 13 well. Treat the previously-generated claim 1 description as superseded/inaccurate. That correction materially changes the § 103 picture: claim 1 is narrower in software scope but broader in hardware scope than the earlier summary implied.

Effective filing dates (critical to what counts as § 102 art):

• Provisional 62/145,672 — 2015‑04‑10; non‑provisional 15/093,109 — 2016‑04‑07.
• AIA applies. Art must predate 2015‑04‑10 (or 2016‑04‑07 if the provisional isn't relied on for a given claim) under § 102(a)(1)/(a)(2).

1. Prior-art inventory (with dates and what each teaches)

2. Governing law and the level of ordinary skill

• Graham v. John Deere factors (scope/content of claims; differences from prior art; PHOSITA level; secondary considerations) and KSR Int'l v. Teleflex (a claimed combination is obvious where elements were known and combined with predictable results; a "finite number of identified, predictable solutions" makes it "obvious to try"; design incentives and market forces count).
• PHOSITA here: a team or individual with a degree in electrical/chemical engineering or analytical chemistry and several years' experience in electrochemical micro-sensors and/or wireless embedded sensing / smart packaging — a routine level of skill that spans exactly the sensor art and the wireless-node art.

3. Claim 1 (system) — element-by-element

Claim 1 elements: (a) sensor body w/ processor, memory, power source, wireless device; (b) probe with distal tip, side opening near tip, tip chamber via the opening, sensor intake in the tip chamber (1st side in the chamber; 2nd side within a capillary sealed from the tip chamber); (c) user device w/ processor, display, input, 2nd wireless device; (d) micro-sensor in the capillary comprising a measuring sensor and a reference electrode; processor receives sensor data and transmits wirelessly; user device receives and displays a subset; tip pierces a cork, substance enters the tip chamber and contacts the sensor intake while the seal is maintained (no ambient contact).

Ground 1 — WO 2002/033404 in view of Revsbech (1989) (and/or US 4,161,437 / EP 0 284 518)

Motivation to combine (KSR rationales (A), (C), (D), (F)):

1. WO '404 expressly states sensors are constrained by the need for "little or no contamination of the wine." The Clark-type membrane in Revsbech/US 4,161,437 is precisely the known structure that lets the analyte (O₂) through while blocking ions/contaminants — a recognized, directly applicable solution to WO '404's stated constraint. This is use of a known technique to improve a similar device in the same way, with predictable results.
2. WO '404 measures dissolved O₂/chemistry; Revsbech/US 4,161,437/EP '518 are miniaturized O₂ cells with known, predictable response. Substituting a miniaturized membrane-covered cell for WO '404's macro sensor is substitution of a known element to obtain its known function (miniaturization to fit through a cork/neck).
3. The market/design driver is explicit and admitted in the '265 background: monitoring a collection requires not removing/handling bottles, and through-seal access is required. That driver is what makes adding a wireless node + a display device (instead of WO '404's tethered/lab download) an obvious adaptation.
4. Needle-form micro-electrodes with the exact tip/openingchamber geometry were known in the literature (Nilsson 0.55 mm needle; Revsbech 5–10 µm tips), so the "probe needle through a barrier" form factor is squarely within the art.

Expected result: predictable — the membrane-covered cell reports the same O₂/analyte signal; no new function arises from the combination. Claim 1 is prima facie obvious over WO '404 + Revsbech.

Ground 2 — Alternate/additional: WO '404 + US 4,161,437 + Tentzeris RFID-on-cork

Adds the well-known wireless node element via the acknowledged art that cork itself can host wireless sensing electronics — removing any argument that "wireless in a cork" was inventive by 2015.

4. Claim 13 (apparatus) — element-by-element

Claim 13 elements: (a) probe needle (casing, tip w/ ≥1 opening, base); (b) capillary with inner sensor tip bearing a porous membrane, seated in the casing, inner tip in the probe tip, base at the base, two seals (at tip and base) creating a vacuum in the casing between them; (c) sensor wire cylinder inside the capillary with a sensor output at the base, a measuring sensor electrode extending toward the membrane, and a reference electrode, remainder of capillary holds electrolyte; (d) sensor body with base receiver, processor, memory, sensor input; (e) a second probe needle with a second base; base couples to receiver → sensor output → sensor input; signal to processor/memory; tip pierces a container seal maintaining it; (i)–(iii) first set and second set of characteristics are disjoint (i.e., swapping the two probes yields non-overlapping measurands).

Ground 3 — Revsbech (1989) / Lu & Yu (2002) in view of US 4,161,437 (or EP 0 284 518) and US 6,068,743

Motivation to combine (rationales (A), (B), (E), (F)): A POSITA building a through-cork analyzer who must measure more than one analyte would, as a matter of routine design, (i) reuse the well-known membrane-covered micro-sensor cell for each analyte, (ii) put each cell in its own replaceable needle so a fouled probe can be swapped (the '265 spec itself says the point of the two probes and removable inner cylinders is reconditioning/replacement — a purely practical, expected benefit), and (iii) select the two electrodes by the two chemistries it already knows (O₂ and pH). This is a finite set of identified, predictable solutions — "obvious to try."

Caveat: the vacuum-between-seals limitation is the one substantive gap (discussed below). Without it, claim 13 falls to Ground 3; with it, the examiner/analyst must supply an additional rationale.

5. Dependent claims (§ 103 sketches)

• Sleep/low-power mode (≈ claim 8): Duty-cycled "sleep-then-wake-to-transmit" wireless sensing was a ubiquitous, well-known technique by 2015, and the motivation is expressly supplied in this very art — a paper on wireless O₂ measurement in sealed wine bottles states that "replacing batteries [in a wine bottle] makes no sense," driving low-power approaches. Known technique + admitted design driver + predictable result → obvious.
• Body sized ≈0.9375 in to fit an unmodified corker (≈ claim 9): Selecting a diameter to fit the standard wine-bottle mouth/cork and a commercial corker is a result-effective dimension / obvious design choice; WO '404's cork-inserted package and the cork-RFID art already size electronics to the cork. Obvious design choice.
• Marketplace listing w/ sensor data (≈ claim 10): WO '404 already contemplates using measurement history for value/authentication; posting to a networked marketplace is applying a known business method via known network technology with arguable obviousness (subject to Alice considerations, but § 103-wise the combination of WO '404 + conventional e-commerce UI is a strong prima facie case).
• Fraud detection by comparing measurements across time; notify server when a threshold is exceeded (≈ claim 11): WO '404's comparison-to-library + control bottles and the art's anomaly-threshold alerting supply the structure; wine fraud is expressly identified in the '265 background as the problem. Motivation is admitted by the patent itself.
• Improper-storage detection over ≥ 1 year (≈ claim 12): Merely reciting a long monitoring duration for the same threshold comparison; time duration alone generally doesn't confer patentability when the function is unchanged. Weak dependent claim.
• Spoilage alerts / two-bottle comparison / user-preference matching (other deps): All map onto WO '404's comparison library, "optimum" values, and control bottles. Obvious.

6. Where the patent is hardest to invalidate (candidate non-obvious features)

The § 103 case is strong on the sensing cell, the system, and the software flow — because those elements were individually known and their combination was predictable. The features with the best survival prospects are:

1. "A vacuum exists within the probe casing between the seals" (claim 13). I did not retrieve a reference that expressly teaches evacuating the annular region between two probe seals for the stated purposes (preventing gas ingress into the sealed container / reducing the wine volume needing to pass the tip / vibration damping). An examiner would need either a vacuum-insulated-probe/Dewar-type reference or an "obvious design choice / obvious to try" rationale (vacuum = known insulator and gas barrier). Absent such a reference, claim 13's vacuum limitation is the strongest non-obviousness argument.
2. The specific "sensor intake" geometry — a chamber-side opening whose first face meets the tip chamber and whose second face sits in a capillary sealed from the tip chamber. This is close to, but arguably more specific than, the Clark membrane/septum arrangement; it invites a written-description/claim-construction fight more than a clean § 103 kill.
3. "First and second characteristic sets are disjoint" — this is a near-inherent property of choosing two different measurands, so it likely does not save claim 13 by itself.

7. Secondary considerations (Graham factor 4)

• The patent touts low cost of manufacture, accuracy, speed, reconditionability. These advantages are attributed to the Fabrication method, which is a substantial restatement of Revsbech's published protocol (KCN etch at 2–8 V → ~10 µm tip; KAu(CN)₂/HAuCl₄ gold plating → 5–15 µm ball; 0.3 M K₂CO₃/0.2 M KHCO₃/1 M KCl electrolyte at pH 10.3; Ag/AgCl reference aged in 0.1 M HCl). Because the asserted advantages flow from the known process, they are weak secondary-consideration evidence and cut against non-obviousness.
• Long-felt need is plausibly supported (the background's wine-vault monitoring problem), but the need was already being addressed by WO '404 and the sealed-bottle wireless-O₂ literature, weakening the "failure of others" narrative.
• No litigation/PTAB history was found (consistent with the prior-generated sections), so there is no validity signal from enforcement either way.

8. Bottom line

• Claim 1 (system): Prima facie obvious under § 103 over WO 2002/033404 in view of Revsbech (1989) (optionally + US 4,161,437/EP 0 284 518), with a wireless-node/substitution rationale (KSR (A)/(C)/(D)). The only foreseeable rebuttal is a claim-construction argument that the claimed "sensor intake … capillary sealed from the tip chamber" is a distinct architecture not taught by the Clark membrane/septum art.
• Claim 13 (apparatus): Prima facie obvious over Revsbech (1989)/Lu & Yu (2002) + US 4,161,437 (or EP '518) + US 6,068,743, except that the "vacuum between the seals" limitation needs an additional reference or an "obvious design choice" rationale; that limitation is the patent's most credible non-obviousness hook.
• Dependent claims: majority are obvious as design choices, admitted motivations (battery replacement impractical; fraud; long-term storage), or inherent/result-of-choice limitations.

9. Explicit caveats and verification steps

1. I could not retrieve the patent's actual examiner patent-citation table (the "Prior Art" list) or any file-wrapper rejections. Some references above (notably Ideacuria's WO '16/199099 family and US 10,996,207) are related art found by citation linkage, not confirmed items of record, and their post-filing dates may disqualify them — I have flagged rather than relied on them.
2. Contradiction flagged: the prior-generated claim summary's description of claim 1 (wine characteristics + comparison data + alert) is inconsistent with the verbatim claim 1 I retrieved; the earlier summary should be corrected. The verbatim text used here should still be verified against USPTO Patent Public Search / PatentCenter before being quoted authoritatively — I obtained it from a secondary database (RPX Insight) cross-checked against the full specification.
3. Date sensitivity is dispositive for several references; verify each reference's effective filing/publication date against 2015‑04‑10 / 2016‑04‑07.
4. The vacuum-between-seals element is the pivot point of the entire apparatus claim; a targeted prior-art search for vacuum-insulated probes / evacuated electrode casings should precede any final validity opinion.