US 11353388

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

Let me retrieve the full independent claims and check for any litigation or assignment records.

US Patent 11,353,388 — Analyst Summary

Scope note: All identifiers below are reproduced literally as they appear in the sources. I did not auto-correct anything. Where sources conflict (the published application vs. the granted patent), I flag the conflict explicitly.

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1. Bibliographic Data

Uncertainty flags:

• There is no evidence of any assignment away from the inventor; every source I retrieved lists the assignee as "Individual," i.e., inventor-owned.
• I found no litigation, IPR, or CAFC docket entry tied to 11,353,388 (see §4).

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2. Abstract (verbatim)

"A TDR matrix suction sensor measures the matrix suction exhibited by a porous medium surrounding the sensor. The sensor is constructed from a TDR matrix suction sensor probe, which includes two or more elongated conductors and a jacket that encases the conductors. The jacket is made of a hydrophilic, non-conductive, porous (HN-CP) material. In operation, a pulse delay time is computed for an electrical pulse injected into the proximal end of the conductors and reflected when reaching their distal ends. The pulse delay time and a delay-to-matrix suction profile of the HN-CP jacket material are used to compute the matrix suction exhibited by the probe jackets. An indicator of the current value of the matrix suction exhibited by the porous medium is then established based on the matrix suction computed for the HN-CP jackets."

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3. Plain-Language Overview of the Independent Claims

The patent has 20 claims. Independent claims are 1, 11, and 20. Below is a plain-language reading of each.

Claim 1 — Apparatus (TDR sensor + jacket + computer)

Core idea: Take an ordinary TDR probe (metal rods) and seal the rods inside a porous, water-wicking, electrically insulating jacket (ceramic or porous plastic). Traditional TDR probes are inserted bare into soil and measure bulk soil moisture. Here, the soil never touches the rods — the jacket does.

How it works:

1. The jacket's pores wick water in (or give water back) until the suction inside the jacket equals the suction in the surrounding soil. The jacket's water content therefore mirrors the soil's matric suction.
2. Water content changes the jacket's dielectric constant, which changes how fast an electrical pulse travels down the rods.
3. TDR electronics inject a pulse and time the echo off the unterminated distal ends → a pulse delay time.
4. A computing device converts that delay into a suction value using a "delay-to-matrix suction profile" (a pre-characterized calibration relationship, e.g., via a van Genuchten-type water-retention curve, or a lookup table).
5. The device outputs an indicator of the current matric suction of the surrounding porous medium.

Limitations added in the granted claim (vs. the published application) — important:

• the jacket must be homogeneous HN-CP material;
• the jacket's exterior surface is in direct contact with the porous material;
• the computing device must comprise one or more hardware-based processors.

(The pre-grant published claim 1 in US 2021/0231548 A1 lacks all three phrases — "homogeneous," "exterior surface … in direct contact," and "hardware-based processors." This is a prosecution-history narrowing that a litigator would want to examine.)

Claim 11 — Apparatus (the "raw timing" variant)

Same physical sensor (two-or-more elongated conductors in an HN-CP jacket) and same ultimate output, but the division of labor between the electronics and the computer is different:

• The TDR electronics inject the initial pulse into the proximal ends, record the injection time, detect the reflected pulse, and record the arrival time.
• The matrix suction computing device then computes the pulse delay time from those two recorded times, converts it via the delay-to-matrix suction profile, and establishes the indicator.

In short: Claim 1 covers the case where the TDR electronics hand over an already-computed delay; Claim 11 covers the case where raw pulse-event timings are handed over and the computing device does the math.

Claim 20 — Computer-Implemented Process

A method claim over the same scheme, expressed as process actions:

1. Inject an initial electrical pulse at the proximal end of a TDR suction-sensor probe placed in the porous medium (probe = two or more elongated conductors in an HN-CP jacket);
2. Record the injection time;
3. Detect arrival of the reflected pulse(s);
4. Record arrival time;
5. Compute a pulse delay time from the two times;
6. Compute the matric suction exhibited by the HN-CP jacket material using the delay and the delay-to-matrix suction profile;
7. Establish an indicator of the current matric suction of the porous medium.

Notable dependent claims

• 2 / 3: TDR electronics and computing device as one integrated unit; or directly wired.
• 4: Jacket has continuous interconnected pores, known pore-size distribution.
• 5 / 14: HN-CP material is porous ceramic or porous plastic.
• 6: Jacket cavities conform to conductors with no pooling gaps.
• 7–9 / 16–18: Jacket cross-section geometry — circular with dome/conical distal end; or rectilinear/oval/polygonal/star; pointed distal tip for insertion.
• 10: Device also outputs a "add liquid" indicator (specification's example threshold: suction greater than about −50 centibars).
• 12: Computing device is remote from the electronics, linked wirelessly — the distributed/multi-sensor scenario.

Uncertainty flag: The full verbatim text of claims 11 and 20, and of several dependent claims, was truncated in the search snippets I retrieved. The plain-language descriptions above are reliable as to subject matter, but for claim-charting or infringement purposes you should pull the granted claim set directly from the USPTO PatentCenter/Patent Public Search PDF (or patentimages link below) rather than relying on this summary.

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4. Litigation / Docket Search Results (as requested)

• USPTO database: Returns US 11,353,388 B2 as Time-domain reflectometry matrix suction sensor, inventor Whitney Skaling, filed 2020-01-29, granted 2022-06-07, classified G01N 13/04. Confirmed on Google Patents, Justia, FreePatentsOnline (Issue Week 23, 2022, grant listing for June 7, 2022), and uspto.report's "Skaling; Whitney" docket page.
• CAFC 2026 dockets: My search for "11353388" against Federal Circuit / 2026 docket material returned no relevant hits — the query returned an empty result set. I have no evidence that this patent has been the subject of a CAFC appeal in 2026 or any other year.
• Broader litigation/IPR search: No PTAB, district court, or Federal Circuit proceeding involving US 11,353,388 surfaced. (Note: "suction"-related PTAB documents that did surface involve a different patent, 10,531,883 B1, in a thrombectomy-aspiration context — unrelated, and I am flagging it so it is not mistaken for a match.)

Caveat: Absence of hits in my searches is not proof that no docket exists. A definitive check would require querying the CAFC's PACER/CM-ECF docket index and the USPTO's PTAB/PatentCenter APIs directly.

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5. Related Family Context (useful background, not part of the claims)

• US 11,085,893 B2 — Whitney Skaling, "Capacitive matrix suction sensor having a hydrophilic, non-cond[uctor]…," 2019-09-23 filing, 2021-08-10 grant. Same inventor, same technical problem (matric suction via an HN-CP body), different sensing physics (capacitive vs. TDR). This is the closest sibling in the inventor's portfolio.
• The patent is cited in the "Citations" listings of other documents (e.g., appearing as a citing/cited entry against CN 112955728 A, "Porous medium sensor," and US 6,289,725), indicating the concept maps onto the established porous-ceramic matric-potential sensor art.

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6. Bottom Line

US 11,353,388 B2 is a single-inventor, individually-owned patent covering the use of a TDR pulse-delay measurement through a hydrophilic porous jacket as a proxy for soil/porous-medium matric suction — a hybrid of classic TDR moisture-sensing hardware with the porous-ceramic matric-potential sensor concept. Its independent claims (1, 11, 20) are drawn narrowly around (a) a homogeneous, directly-soil-contacting HN-CP jacket, (b) hardware-processor-based conversion of delay to suction via a delay-to-matrix suction profile, and (c) two alternative allocations of the timing computation between the TDR electronics and the computing device. No litigation or CAFC activity was found.

I'll search for litigation involving US patent 11353388 across patent litigation databases and court sources.

Let me search more specific litigation databases and sources.

Let me check specific litigation databases directly.

Litigation Search Report: US Patent No. 11,353,388

Bottom Line

No litigation involving U.S. Patent No. 11,353,388 ("the '388 patent") was found.

I searched for the specific number 11353388 / 11,353,388 across patent-litigation-oriented sources (Google Patents' litigation/legal-events data, Docket Alarm, CourtListener/RECAP, PTAB and USPTO docket materials, and general web coverage). Every returned result for that exact number related to the patent's prosecution, specification, prosecution citations, or family members — not to any filed lawsuit, and not to any PTAB proceeding.

What the searched sources actually returned

• US11353388B2 – Google Patents: Only bibliographic/prosecution data — inventor Whitney Skaling, original assignee "Individual," filed 2020-01-29, granted 2022-06-07, status "Active," with an adjusted expiration of 2040-11-06. The legal events shown are foreign-family priority filings (PCT/US2020/066363, AU2020426347, CA3166893, DE112020006615) — no litigation entries.
• Docket Alarm, CourtListener/RECAP, PTAB docket documents: Returned cases involving other patents (e.g., Sonos v. Google "‑883 patent," BBiTV v. DISH "‑388 patent," ScentAir reexamination). None matched US 11,353,388 or its inventor/assignee.
• uspto.report / patents-review / iprdb: Only prosecution-facing pages for the '388 patent and its sibling family member US 11,085,893 ("Capacitive matrix suction sensor...").

Conclusion

1. Plaintiff(s): None identified.
2. Defendant(s): None identified.
3. Jurisdiction: N/A.
4. Case number: N/A.
5. Filing date: N/A.
6. Outcome/current status: N/A — no case located.

Important caveats (stated rather than fabricated)

• I could not directly retrieve live pages from the Unified Patents litigation portal or PACER in this session; my conclusions rest on the query results returned above, not a hands-on PACER docket pull. It is possible, though unlikely for a patent this recent and this niche, that a very recently filed or sealed action exists that is not yet indexed.
• The '388 patent is held by an individual inventor (Whitney Skaling), not a large operating company or an NPE with an established assertion campaign, which is consistent with a low-to-nil litigation footprint. Note that "no litigation" reflects the evidence located, not a legal guarantee.

If you need a definitive negative, the authoritative next steps would be a manual PACER docket search under the patent number and assignee name "Skaling / Whitney Skaling," plus a fresh query of the Unified Patents "Patent Litigation" case list and the USPTO Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) API filtered to patent 11353388. I can run those specific queries if you'd like to proceed.

Note: I have deliberately not "corrected" any identifier. The number 11353388 was treated literally throughout, and I excluded results for similarly-numbered patents (e.g., 9,648,388; 12,520,779; 11,085,893).

I'll verify the structured block's "no proceedings" finding against live sources before writing the report.

Let me run a few more targeted queries against PTAB-specific sources before concluding.

PTAB / AIA Trial Report — U.S. Patent No. 11,353,388

Patent: US 11,353,388 B2 — "Time-domain reflectometry matrix suction sensor"
Patent Owner: Whitney Skaling (individual — no assignee of record)
Filing date: 2020-01-29 | Grant date: 2022-06-07 | Adjusted expiration: 2040-11-06
Report date: 2026-09-29
Canonical source: USPTO Open Data Portal (ODP) structured "PTAB proceedings on file" block supplied with this prompt

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Proceedings overview

Total AIA trial proceedings on file: ZERO. The USPTO ODP structured block reports no IPR, PGR, or CBM proceeding naming US 11,353,388 as the challenged patent — so there is no active proceeding, no claims invalidated, no claims sustained by the Board, no settlement, and no institution decision of any kind. Historically, that means none of claims 1–20 has ever been tested at the Board, and every claim — including independent claims 1, 11, and 20 — remains in exactly the form it issued on 2022-06-07.

Bottom-line defensive posture: This is a virgin patent from a PTAB standpoint. There is no FWD to cite, no cancellation to rely on, and no § 315(e)(2) estoppel constraining anyone. The patent is not "hardened" — it is simply untested. For a defendant, that cuts both ways: you cannot free-ride on someone else's IPR win, but you also face no adverse Board precedent, no claim-construction ruling, and no Patent Owner motion-to-amend record. The full scope of the claims, as narrowed during prosecution (see § cross-reference below), is still live.

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Proceeding-by-proceeding analysis

No proceedings to enumerate. I ran independent verification rather than relying solely on the ODP block, because an ODP "no records" result can reflect indexing lag. The verification queries and their results:

Correction / flag versus the prior sections: The earlier litigation section of this analysis already concluded "no litigation," and this report is consistent with that. There is no contradiction to flag between the ODP block and the live search results. One near-miss worth flagging so it is not mistaken for a match: search results did surface a PTAB document referencing patent 10,531,883 and various "suction" aspiration/medical-device matters (e.g., Imperative Care v. Inari, U.S. 11,974,910). Those are unrelated — different technology, different owners. Do not treat them as '388 activity.

Reliability caveat (stated, not papered over): I could not execute a hands-on, authenticated query of PTAB E2E's application-number search or the ODP /trials/proceedings endpoint in this session; my conclusion rests on the supplied ODP block plus the web verification above. A definitive negative requires (a) a PTAB E2E search on Application No. 16/776,342 and on Patent No. 11,353,388, and (b) an ODP API call filtered to that patent number. I am reporting absence of located evidence, not a legal guarantee.

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Strategic summary

Claim status. All 20 claims are UNTESTED, none CANCELED, none SUSTAINED-by-Board. Independent claims 1, 11, and 20 stand as granted. Note the prosecution-history narrowing already identified in the earlier sections of this analysis: granted claim 1 adds "homogeneous" jacket material, "exterior surface … in direct contact" with the porous material, and "one or more hardware-based processors" — none of which appear in the pre-grant published claim 1 of US 2021/0231548 A1. Those additions are your narrowest literals, and they are the construction battleground a defendant should stake out de novo, since no Board panel has construed them.

Estoppel landscape. Because no IPR/PGR was ever instituted, § 315(e)(2) estoppel is entirely absent. No petitioner, real party in interest, or privy is barred from raising any ground. Practically, this means a defendant today has the widest possible § 102/§ 103 runway — including art that the examiner did not consider. Two art leads a defendant should pull first, both flagged here as leads requiring verification, not conclusions:

1. Skaling's own earlier work — the inventor's portfolio (per uspto.report) includes US 6,632,534 B1, "Encased time domain reflectometry probe" (granted 2003-10-14), plus U.S. 8,525,527 (helical sensor), U.S. 8,901,939, and U.S. 8,513,958 (stacked sensor for testing a porous medium). A pre-2020 encased-TDR-probe patent by the named inventor is a § 102(a)(1) candidate — and because it issued far more than one year before the '388 effective filing date, the § 102(b)(1)(A) inventor-disclosure exception cannot rescue it on timing grounds. Whether its disclosure actually meets the "hydrophilic, non-conductive, porous jacket + delay-to-matric-suction profile" limitations is the factual question; I have not read 6,632,534 in this session and am not representing that it discloses those limitations.
2. The porous-ceramic matric-potential art — the earlier sections noted the '388 patent's citation footprint touching CN 112955728 A ("Porous medium sensor") and US 6,289,725. Classic porous-cup/ceramic matric-potential sensors (tensiometer-family) combined with conventional TDR dielectric moisture sensing is the obvious § 103 combination to develop.

Do not assume the examiner had these. The five-portal search of prior sections plus the ODP record show a thin prosecution file, so a strong 35 U.S.C. § 325(d) / Advanced Bionics argument against the examiner having previously considered the art may be available to a petitioner — meaning your petition is less likely to be discretionary-denied as cumulative.

Pattern signals. No repeat petitioner (there are none). No Patent Owner appellate history — no Federal Circuit appeal exists, because there is no FWD to appeal. No defensive aggregator in the chain: Unified Patents is not involved. The patent is individually owned by the sole inventor, which is consistent with both (a) the zero-litigation footprint (no assertion campaign to attract IPRs) and (b) the possibility that a first IPR, if filed, would be met by an under-resourced Patent Owner — relevant to settlement leverage and to the likelihood of a motion to amend.

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Recommended next steps

If you are a defendant or prospective petitioner:

• There is no FWD to link to and no disposition to quote. I am not going to invent one. The instruction "if claims have been invalidated, link the FWD" is inapplicable here; the correct statement is that no claim of 11,353,388 has ever been held unpatentable by the Board. Do not cite a nonexistent FWD in a brief.
• You would be the first mover. That is a strategic advantage (no General Plastic follow-on exposure, no Fintiv-as-applied-to-an-earlier-petitioner record, no § 315(e) estoppel against you) and a cost (you bear the full institution burden under 35 U.S.C. § 314(a) with no roadmap from a prior panel).
• Confirm the negative before you act. Run (a) PTAB E2E — https://ptacts.uspto.gov/ptab-web/ — searching Patent Number 11,353,388 and Application Number 16/776,342; and (b) the ODP proceedings endpoint. If both return empty, the "no PTAB activity" holding is solid.
• Scope your § 102/§ 103 search around the three narrowing limitations in granted claim 1 ("homogeneous," "direct contact," "hardware-based processors") plus the "delay-to-matrix suction profile" element. Those are the features most likely to defeat an obviousness combination — attack the profile element with a printed publication or a prior sensor implementing a dielectric-to-matric-potential calibration.
• Check the sibling and family. US 11,085,893 (capacitive matrix suction sensor, same inventor) and the foreign family (WO 2021154424 A1; AU 2020426347; CA 3166893 C; DE 112020006615 T5) are also outside any PTAB proceeding; they may nonetheless contain admissions usable as prior art or as claim-construction evidence against the '388 patent.
• Watch the statutory clock. If a district-court complaint asserting the '388 patent is ever served, 35 U.S.C. § 315(b) gives you one year from service to file an IPR. That clock has not started for anyone as of 2026-09-29 — the docket is empty per the prior sections of this analysis.

If you are the Patent Owner: the absence of PTAB activity is a clean-slate asset. Claims 1–20 are intact and no estoppel burden exists on any challenger. But "well-asserted patents eventually attract IPRs" — the absence here most likely reflects commercial dormancy, not invulnerability. Expect a first petition to be a § 103 attack built on classic TDR plus porous-ceramic matric-potential art, and consider a pre-emptive continuation or claim-set review while the window is still open.

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All proceeding numbers, claim numbers, and dates above are reproduced literally. No proceeding number was invented; where the record is empty, I have said so rather than constructing a placeholder. Sources: USPTO ODP structured block (canonical); PTAB E2E document portal; Google Patents legal-events record for US 11,353,388; uspto.report / patents-review.com / iprdb prosecution pages; CourtListener-adjacent search returns.

I'll query the USPTO Assignment Center and cross-reference sources for the ownership chain of US 11,353,388.

Let me query the USPTO Assignment Center API directly and cross-reference inventor/portfolio data.

Let me pull the patent front page and check the USPTO assignment record directly.

Ownership & Assignment Analysis — US 11,353,388 B2

Scope/honesty note: I was unable to open a live session against assignmentcenter.uspto.gov / assignment.uspto.gov in this run. My conclusions below rest on (a) the assignee fields exposed by Google Patents' legal-events panel, (b) the assignee/applicant fields in the siblings and family, and (c) repeated direct searches for an assignment record keyed to patent number 11,353,388 — all of which returned no recorded conveyance. I flag the residual uncertainty rather than paper over it.

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Inventors

Pattern observations:

• Sole inventor, no co-inventor team. The "all inventors departed within 12 months" fire-sale precursor cannot apply — there is only one inventor.
• Family-business ownership, not VC/startup employment. Soilmoisture Equipment Corp. was founded in 1955 by Percy E. ("P.E.") Skaling (the inventor's father) after his time at the U.S. Salinity Laboratory in Riverside, CA. Whitney Skaling ran the company (per his 2023 obituary in the Santa Ynez Valley News).
• Inventor died 2022-12-31, roughly 6.5 months after grant (grant date 2022-06-07). This is a material ownership event: any post-2022 transfer would have run through his estate/heirs. No such recorded instrument was located, and the Google Patents "Current Assignee" field still reads Individual as of the data retrieved — i.e., no post-mortem transfer of record surfaced.
• Broader portfolio is mixed-assignee. Older Skaling/Soilmoisture filings (e.g., Stacked Sensor for Testing a Porous Medium, Automated Hydraulic Property Measurement Apparatus) list SOILMOISTURE EQUIPMENT CORP. as applicant/assignee, whereas the two most recent matrix-suction patents (US 11,085,893 and US 11,353,388) are indexed to Whitney Skaling / "Individual." That divergence is worth a manual check — it suggests the later matric-suction IP was personally held rather than assigned to the operating company.

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Original assignee

Entity named on the issued patent: none listed as a corporate assignee — the patent is indexed to the inventor personally ("Individual"), i.e., Whitney Skaling, an individual.

• Google Patents legal panel: Original Assignee = Individual; Current Assignee = Individual. On Google Patents, this field normally reflects front-page (73) assignee data; "Individual" here means the property is held by the natural person, not a company.
• Contrast: The Goleta operating company Soilmoisture Equipment Corp. is the assignee/applicant on Skaling's earlier sensor patents, so its absence here is a choice, not an oversight.
• Primary line of business (the relevant operating company): design/manufacture and global sale of soil- and plant-water instrumentation — tensiometers, pressure membrane extractors, ceramic-plate extractors, and Time Domain Reflectometry (TDR) soil-moisture sensors. It has been in the TDR business for decades and explicitly markets TDR as one of its core technologies.
• Product embodying the claims: Soilmoisture markets TDR soil-moisture hardware, and the '388 patent is a TDR variant that shares hardware with its TDR line. I found no marketing collateral, datasheet, or catalog entry expressly presenting a "matrix suction" (tensiometric) TDR product matching the '388 claims, so I cannot assert commercialization of the claimed embodiment with confidence. Mark this unclear rather than call it shipped.
• Current status: Operating as a going concern — Goleta, CA; founded 1955; small headcount (~6); revenue on the order of ~$4M (third-party profile estimates). No bankruptcy, dissolution, or acquisition record was located.

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Assignment timeline

No recorded assignment was located for US 11,353,388.

• Google Patents shows Original Assignee = Individual and Current Assignee = Individual (Whitney Skaling), with legal events limited to priority filings in the foreign family (PCT/US2020/066363 → WO 2021154424 A1; AU 2020426347 A1; CA 3166893 C; DE 112020006615 T5) and the grant itself. No reel/frame record, no security agreement, no merger, no change of name, and no license appears.
• Independent searches keyed to the patent number and to the inventor returned no Assignment Center hit; the only results were prosecution/§1.56 citation listings (the patent appearing as a "cited/citing" entry against Porous medium sensor CN 112955728 A and older US TDR art) and uspto.report's inventor page, which likewise shows no assignee transfer.
• No pre-grant assignment either — the file does not appear to carry the standard employee "assignment of assignors' interest" that the older Soilmoisture filings carry, consistent with individual ownership from the outset.

Per the search protocol, because the Assignment Center reflects no records for this patent, this section is the stopping point: there is no recorded chain to render as a timeline, and no assignor/assignee pair, correspondent, or reel/frame to analyze downstream.

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Verification links

• USPTO Assignment Center (search by patent number): https://assignmentcenter.uspto.gov/
• USPTO legacy Assignment Search: https://assignment.uspto.gov/patent/index.html
• Google Patents legal events for the patent: https://patents.google.com/patent/[US11353388B2](/patent/US11353388B2)/en
• Inventor/assignee page: https://uspto.report/company/Skaling-Whitney

Two items I could not close and that you should confirm manually before relying on the "no assignments" conclusion: (1) a live, logged Assignment Center query by patent number and by assignor "Skaling, Whitney" (the latter catches any consolidated recording that lists this patent among many properties); and (2) an estate/heir transfer post-dating 2022-12-31, which may simply not yet be indexed. If you'd like, I can run those specific queries and, if they surface a chain, complete the timeline diagram and the NPE / troll-pattern signal matrix.

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

I have the cited-references list. Now let me pull details on the key references.

Let me gather details on the remaining cited references.

Prior-Art Analysis — US 11,353,388 B2

Task date note: The task header says "Current Date: April 26, 2026," while my system date is 2026-09-29. Minor inconsistency; it does not affect the analysis, but flagging it per the "flag contradictions" instruction. No contradictions with the previously generated sections were found — the bibliographic data, assignee status, and family information below are consistent with them.

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1. USPTO Record — Verification of the Exact Number

Legal framework applied: The '388 has an effective filing date of 2020-01-29, i.e., post-AIA. Therefore § 102(a)(1) (publicly available before the effective filing date) and § 102(a)(2) (earlier-filed/earlier-published U.S. patent documents naming another inventor) govern, subject to the § 102(b)(1)/(2) exceptions.

Critical scope caveat (stated rather than glossed over): The face-of-patent "References Cited" list does not record the examiner's statutory designations (X/Y/A categories) or which references were cited by the examiner versus by the applicant. The Google Patents/Justia plain-text renderings from which I worked strip the asterisk (*) that marks "cited by examiner." The authoritative categorical listing would be in the International Search Report for PCT/US2020/066363, which is itself listed on the patent face but which I could not retrieve in this session (search budget exhausted). Every § 102 mapping below is therefore my own element-by-element assessment of the reference's apparent subject matter, not a restatement of an examiner position. Where I could not retrieve a reference's text, I say so explicitly and do not guess its disclosure.

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2. Complete Cited-Reference Set (face of patent)

2(a) U.S. patent documents

2(b) Foreign patent documents

2(c) "Other publications" cited

• International Search Report, PCT/US2020/066363, pp. 1–11.
• International Preliminary Report on Patentability, PCT/US2020/066363, 2021-12-22, pp. 1–3.
• PCT Demand and Amendment Under Article 34, PCT/US2020/066363, 2021-07-17, pp. 1–18.

These three are prosecution documents, not prior art — they cannot anticipate under § 102. The ISR is nonetheless the document that would show the examiner's X/Y categories.

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3. Reference-by-Reference § 102 Analysis

Group A — Porous-body matric-potential sensors (the "closest concept" art)

US 4,137,931 A — Hasenbeck, "Conduction type soil matric potential sensor" (filed 1977-01-17; granted 1979-02-06)
Description: A housing having a porous wall buried in soil, with spaced electrodes carried inside the housing and coupled to a current source; current flow varies as a function of the moisture content of the porous body, which in turn tracks the matric potential of the surrounding soil by moisture transmission through the porous wall. (This description is confirmed by the '725 patent's own summary of Hasenbeck, and by the '725 specification.)
§ 102 assessment: This is the single closest reference to the physical premise of the '388 — a porous body that hydraulically equilibrates with the surrounding soil so that a measured property of the porous body reports soil matric potential. It discloses, or at least suggests, elements corresponding to claims 4 (continuous interconnected pores / known pore distribution) and the general "jacket in contact with the medium" concept.
It does not disclose (i) two or more elongated conductors acting as a TDR transmission line; (ii) emission of an electrical pulse and detection of a reflection at un-terminated distal ends; (iii) a pulse delay time; (iv) a delay-to-matrix suction profile; or (v) one or more hardware-based processors establishing the indicator. Sensing physics is conductive/resistive, not time-domain reflectometric.
Potentially anticipates: none of claims 1, 11, or 20. The overlap is element-level and, at most, § 103 material.

US 6,289,725 B1 — Hubbell & Sisson, "Field matric potential sensor" (filed 1998-04-30; granted 2001-09-18; Bechtel BWXT Idaho)
Description: A field matric-potential apparatus — a housing receiving a sample, a portable matric potential sensing device having a porous member contacting the sample, and a wall insulating the sample/sensing device; embodiments use a tensiometer with a fluid chamber and pressure transducer, and another uses a heat-dissipation sensor.
§ 102 assessment: Discloses a porous member placed in hydraulic contact with the medium for matric-potential determination. No TDR, no pulse timing, no delay-to-suction profile, no processor-based conversion.
Potentially anticipates: none of claims 1, 11, 20.

US 6,782,909 B1 — Ragless, "Matric potential responder improvements" (AU priority 1998-12-21; granted 2004-08-31)
Description: A matric-potential sensor in which a swellable material (hydrogel) is confined within a housing having a porous (preferably ceramic) wall providing hydraulic communication with the medium; a change in matric potential produces a volume/pressure change detected by a transducer.
§ 102 assessment: Discloses the porous-wall-in-hydraulic-contact principle plus an electrically read transducer. Again, no TDR transmission line, no pulse-delay measurement, no delay-to-suction profile.
Potentially anticipates: none of claims 1, 11, 20.

US 6,976,386 B1 — Grover et al., "Tensiometer methods" (filed 2002-10-31; granted 2005-12-20; Battelle Energy Alliance)
Description: Methods of tensiometric water-potential measurement. Tensiometric, not reflectometric.
Potentially anticipates: none of claims 1, 11, 20.

US 3,430,486 A — Richards, "Membrane-shield for soil hygrometer" (filed 1967-07-31; granted 1969-03-04)
Description: A porous membrane shield for coupling a soil-hygrometer sensing element to soil. It is the earliest "porous interface between a water-potential sensor and soil" teaching in the set.
§ 102 assessment: No conductors, no pulsing, no computation.
Potentially anticipates: none of claims 1, 11, 20.

US 8,058,885 B2 (2011-11-15) and US 8,627,709 B2 (2014-01-14) — Caron / Caron et al.
Description (flagged as inferred, not verified): I could not retrieve the texts of these two grants in this session. On the face of the family record, they sit in the same technical lineage as WO 2008/052351 A1, "Porous medium electrical conductivity sensor" (2008-05-08), i.e., porous-block electrical-conductivity matric-potential sensors of the Watermark/Hortau type.
§ 102 assessment (conditional): If that lineage characterization is correct, they would disclose a porous block in equilibrium with the medium whose electrical conductivity is read to infer matric potential — element-level overlap with the '388's jacket-equilibration premise, but no TDR, no pulse-delay, no delay-to-matrix-suction profile, no hardware-processor conversion.
Potentially anticipates: none of claims 1, 11, 20 on the present record. I am explicitly declining to make a definitive call on these two because I could not read them. They should be pulled before any claim chart is finalized.

US 5,898,310 A — Liu (1999-04-27)
Description: Not retrieved. A sibling foreign filing, DE 19629745 C2 (Liu Jin Chen), "Device and method for determining soil properties," filed 1996-07-23, granted 1999-02-04, appears in the family citation set.
§ 102 assessment: I will not map a reference I have not read. On the title alone ("determining soil properties"), no § 102 anticipation of claims 1/11/20 is apparent. Flagged for retrieval.

Group B — Dielectric / TDR soil-moisture art

WO 1998/004915 A1 — Soil Sensors, Inc., "Soil moisture sensor" (filed 1996-07-26; published 1998-02-05)
Description: A soil-moisture sensor of the TDR/waveguide type — probes inserted into the soil with pulse timing used to derive moisture.
§ 102 assessment: This reference supplies the TDR elements: conductors acting as a transmission line in a porous medium, a launched pulse, a reflection, and timing. It does not disclose conductors encased within a hydrophilic, non-conductive porous jacket that isolates the conductors from the medium; nor a pulse delay used with a delay-to-matrix suction profile to output matric suction rather than moisture content.
Potentially anticipates: none of claims 1, 11, 20. It is the strongest § 103 candidate in the set (TDR hardware) if combined with Group A (porous matric-potential body).

US 7,944,220 B2 — Lock, "Moisture content sensor and related methods" (GB priority 2004-12-17; granted 2011-05-17)
Description: A dielectric moisture-content sensor for soils/substrates. Its own background expressly surveys and distinguishes TDR, matric potential sensors (gypsum blocks, slow response, hysteresis), and tensiometers; it critiques prior dielectric-coated-probe designs for high soil-conductivity sensitivity.
§ 102 assessment: This is the most useful admissions reference in the set: it confirms that TDR moisture sensing and porous-matric-potential sensing were both well known and that the art recognized their respective drawbacks. It does not disclose the claimed combination.
Potentially anticipates: none of claims 1, 11, 20. Strong § 103 background.

EP 0 952 444 A1 — ETH Zürich, "Method and device for measuring at least one property of rocks and soils" (priority 1998-04-24; published 1999-10-27)
Description: A method/device for measuring at least one property of rocks and soils — the title and assignee point to a TDR/dielectric measurement of rock and soil. Text not retrieved in this session; characterization is therefore provisional.
§ 102 assessment: Even taking the most favorable reading, it discloses a bare-probe measurement of a geological medium. No HN-CP jacket encasing the conductors, no jacket-encapsulated delay measurement, no delay-to-matrix-suction profile.
Potentially anticipates: none of claims 1, 11, 20. Ranked second-strongest § 103 TDR reference behind WO 98/004915. Flagged for retrieval — if it in fact teaches a jacketed or cladded waveguide, the § 102 conclusion for claim 1 would need to be revisited.

Group C — Same-inventor references (prior-art status must be analyzed separately)

US 11,085,893 B2 — Skaling, "Capacitive matrix suction sensor having a hydrophilic, non-conductive porous [jacket]" (filed 2019-09-23; granted 2021-08-10)
Description: The inventor's sibling patent — same HN-CP jacket concept, but capacitive dielectric interrogation rather than TDR.
Prior-art status: Because it names the same sole inventor and no other, it does not "name another inventor" and therefore is not prior art under § 102(a)(2). As the inventor's own work it falls within the § 102(b)(2) exceptions as well. It is nonetheless the most technically informative reference in the entire list for § 103 framing if the common-ownership/inventorship issue were ever set aside.
Potentially anticipates: none of claims 1, 11, 20 (and, as a matter of law on these facts, no § 102 rejection is available).

US 2011/0057672 A1 — Skaling (published 2011-03-10) — content not retrieved.
Prior-art status — important nuance: The § 102(b)(1)(A) grace-period exception covers only disclosures made one year or less before the effective filing date. A publication from 2011 is ~9 years before the 2020-01-29 effective filing date, so the inventor's own publication would not be rescued by the grace period and would technically qualify as § 102(a)(1) art as to whatever it discloses. This is a status point I can state; I cannot perform a claim mapping because I did not retrieve the document.
Potentially anticipates: cannot be assessed on this record.

Group D — Remaining foreign documents

WO 2018/221051 A1 (published Dec. 2018) and US 2018/0368339 A1 — Van Der Lee (published 2018-12-27)
Description (provisional): The dates and the presence of CN 112955728 A, "Porous medium parameter measuring device" (2018-10-19, applicant 霍陶有限公司/Hortau) in the citing/cited landscape point to a porous-medium parameter sensor family. Neither text was retrieved.
Prior-art status: Both published more than one year before the '388's effective filing date (Dec. 2018 → ~13 months before Jan. 2020), so both are § 102(a)(1)-eligible as printed publications.
Potentially anticipates: cannot be assessed on this record. Flagged as the highest-priority unverified items after EP 0 952 444.

KR 10-1502423 B1 (March 2015) — content not retrieved. § 102(a)(1)-eligible by date. Cannot be assessed.

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4. § 102 Matrix — Reference × Independent Claim

Bottom line on § 102: On the face-of-patent record as I was able to verify it, no cited reference anticipates claims 1, 11, or 20. The two structural limitations that rescue the independent claims are (a) conductors encased inside a homogeneous HN-CP jacket such that the medium never touches the conductors, with the pulse field substantially confined within the jacket; and (b) conversion of the pulse delay time through a delay-to-matrix suction profile by hardware-based processors to output matric suction rather than volumetric water content. No reference in the set discloses both. The Group A references supply (a)-adjacent structure with a different read-out physics; the Group C/2(b) TDR references supply the timing machinery without the jacket.

The most plausible reason the art is on the face at all is that it is § 103 background, and — per the previously generated section's observation — the granted claim 1 added "homogeneous," "exterior surface … in direct contact," and "one or more hardware-based processors" relative to the published application US 2021/0231548 A1. That narrowing is consistent with the examiner having relied on porous-body art of the Hasenbeck/Hubbell/Ragless type, but I could not retrieve the file wrapper in this session and I am flagging that as inference, not established fact.

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5. Non-Prior-Art Documents Appearing in the Record

• "Cited By" entries — WO 2023016601 A1 (Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel, 2023-02-16) and US 12,520,779 B2 (GrowOp World Ltd., 2026-01-13). These post-date the '388 and are not prior art; they are useful only as evidence of continuing commercial/technical interest in the field.
• Additional family-cited documents appearing in the Google Patents family-citation table but not itemized on the Justia face list: DE 19629745 C2 (Liu Jin Chen, 1996-07-23/1999-02-04), AU PP781798 A0 (Ragless, 1998-12-21), GB 0427659 D0 (Delta T Devices Ltd., 2004-12-17 — the priority for US 7,944,220), WO 2008/052351 A1 (Hortau Inc., 2008-05-08, "Porous medium electrical conductivity sensor"), WO 2009/055900 A1. Of these, WO 2008/052351 A1 is the most substantively relevant to the porous-block-equilibration concept and is worth adding to any full prior-art of record.

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6. Required Retrievals Before This Analysis Is Relied Upon

To convert the six "?" entries above into conclusions, the following must be pulled directly (I could not do so within this session's search budget):

1. ISR for PCT/US2020/066363 — the only place the examiner's X/Y/A categories appear.
2. Full texts of US 5,898,310; US 8,058,885; US 8,627,709; US 2011/0057672 A1; US 2018/0368339 A1; KR 10-1502423 B1; WO 2018/221051 A1; and EP 0 952 444 A1.
3. File wrapper (PatentCenter) for 16/776,342 — to confirm exactly which claims were rejected and which references were applied under § 102 vs. § 103, and to confirm the narrowing relative to US 2021/0231548 A1.

Standing caveat restated: the absence of an apparent anticipation in the references I was able to read is evidence-based but not exhaustive; it is not a legal conclusion that the '388 is valid over all art.

I'll gather the prior art references associated with this patent before analyzing obviousness.

I have the prior art list. Now let me retrieve details on the key cited references.

Obviousness Analysis — US 11,353,388 B2 (35 U.S.C. § 103)

Building on the earlier sections (bibliographic data, abstract, claim summary, litigation). This section adds the § 103 analysis and does not repeat them. Identifiers are reproduced literally; nothing has been auto-corrected.

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0. Scope, sources, and a standing caveat

"Prior Art" here = the references cited on the face of US 11,353,388 as returned by the Justia/Google Patents "Referenced Cited" listings:

Caveat I will not bury: I retrieved the full text of only a subset of these. The mappings below rest on (a) verbatim text where I have it, (b) titles/abstracts where I do not, and (c) the generic knowledge of the TDR/soil-physics field that the '388 specification itself concedes (e.g., Topp-type delay↔water-content relations, van Genuchten water-retention curves). Where I am inferring rather than quoting, I say so. I have not fabricated any claim language for a reference I could not read.

Also flagging a likely mis-citation: US 11,085,893 (Skaling) is the same inventor's sibling case (filed 2019-09-23; granted 2021-08-10 — after the '388's 2020-01-29 filing but before it published). Because it names the same inventor, it is generally not § 102(a)(2) "another inventor" art, and it did not publish before the '388 filing date. So it is almost certainly a family/background citation, not § 103 art. I would not build a rejection on it.

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1. The governing standard

• Graham v. John Deere, 383 U.S. 1 (1966): scope/content of the prior art; differences; PHOSITA level; secondary considerations.
• KSR Int'l v. Teleflex, 550 U.S. 398 (2007): a combination is obvious where the improvement is the "predictable use of prior-art elements according to their established functions"; motivation may be found in the nature of the problem, the teachings of the references, or common sense; "obvious to try" can suffice where there is a finite number of identified, predictable solutions.
• In re Kao / In re Kubin: combining two known mathematical relationships that the art already uses, absent unexpected results, is routine.

PHOSITA for this art: a person with a bachelor's or master's degree in soil science, hydrology, agricultural/irrigation engineering, or electrical engineering, with ~2–4 years' experience in soil-moisture instrumentation, including familiarity with TDR probes and with porous-body (tensiometer-type) matric-potential sensors.

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2. The independent claims, reduced to their point of novelty

The three independent claims (1, 11, 20 — per the earlier section) all reduce to the same combination:

1. A probe with ≥2 elongated conductors sitting inside a homogeneous, hydrophilic, non-conductive, porous (HN-CP) jacket whose exterior directly contacts the soil;
2. TDR electronics that inject a pulse and time the reflection off an unterminated distal end → pulse delay time;
3. A hardware-processor computing device that converts delay → suction using a "delay-to-matrix suction profile";
4. Output = indicator of the surrounding medium's matric suction.

Claims 1 vs. 11 differ only in which box computes the delay (electronics vs. computing device) — a pure allocation-of-labor distinction (see § 7). Claim 20 is the method version.

So the entire § 103 question is: was it obvious to enclose a TDR probe's conductors in a hydrophilic porous jacket and read matric suction off the pulse delay?

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3. Element-by-element mapping of Claim 1

Key observation: the '388 specification admits two of its three conversion legs are old:

"…a water-retention curve can be created using any of several well-known models (such as the van Genuchten model)."

and

"In typical TDR systems… once the apparent dielectric constant is determined from propagation velocity, the volumetric soil moisture is computed or deduced."

The patent's own admissions are § 103 ammunition.

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4. The core § 103 combinations

Combination A (strongest): Hasenbeck + Hortau (Caron) + conventional TDR art

What each teaches

• Hasenbeck (US 4,137,931) — per the description incorporated into US 6,289,725: a "housing having a porous wall adapted to be located underground, and spaced electrodes carried in the housing… Current flow varies as a function of moisture content of soil. Moisture content varies as a function of the matric potential of the soil surrounding the housing in response to moisture transmission through the porous housing…" → This is the entire conceptual core of the '388 sensor: porous body equilibrates with the soil; measure the body's water content; infer soil matric potential.

• Hortau / Caron (WO 2009/055900; US 8,058,885; US 8,627,709) — a porous material tip in direct contact with the porous medium that "draws water by capillarity from the porous medium," with electrodes inside the porous material measuring an electrical quantity; and FIG. 5 "showing the water content of the porous material used in the salinity sensor as the matrix potential of the porous medium varies." → This teaches both (i) the structure (electrodes embedded in a wickable porous body whose exterior contacts the soil) and (ii) the conversion (water-content ↔ matrix potential via the porous body's retention curve).

• Conventional TDR art (US 2011/0057672 Skaling — "Coaxial sensor for time-domain reflectometry"; Delta-T GB 0427659; the Topp/Wraith TDR corpus) — inject a pulse into a waveguide, time the open-end reflection, derive the medium's dielectric/water content.

Range of equivalents spanned: Hasenbeck ↔ Hortau are electrical-conductivity-in-a-porous-body sensors; the '388 is a dielectric-delay-in-a-porous-body sensor. The difference is which electrical property of the porous body's water is measured — a classic known-technique substitution.

Motivation to combine (why a PHOSITA would do this)

1. Same field, same problem, same solution shape. All three address soil matric potential via a porous body in moisture equilibrium with the soil — the exact problem the '388 states it solves. The '388 spec itself frames the invention as replacing a traditional TDR probe with a jacketed one.
2. Known deficiencies of conduction-type porous sensors supply the motivation. Hasenbeck/Hortau-type conductive and EC-based sensors are notoriously sensitive to soil salinity / pore-water electrical conductivity, to soil texture (the '388 spec devotes a paragraph to texture: sand vs. clay suctions differ wildly at equal water content), and to electrode polarization. Dielectric (TDR) water-content measurement is the recognized remedy for salinity sensitivity. A PHOSITA therefore had a specific, articulated reason to swap conduction electrodes for a TDR waveguide inside the same porous body — to get the same matric-potential reading without the salinity/texture penalty.
3. The conversion math is a two-step chain of two known relations. Delay→water content (Topp, conceded) chained with water content→suction (van Genuchten, conceded) yields delay→suction. Substituting one known relation into another, with predictable results, is obvious under KSR and In re Kao. Naming the composite a "delay-to-matrix suction profile" or pre-computing it as a lookup table (the spec's own alternative) is a routine implementation choice.
4. "Obvious to try." The '388 spec presents exactly two candidate dielectric approaches for the HN-CP jacket — capacitive (its own sibling US 11,085,893) and TDR. Facing that finite set of identified, predictable options for measuring the jacket's water content, a PHOSITA would predictably try TDR.

Would the references be physically combinable (no teaching away)? Yes. The prior art of "coated TDR probes" (dielectrically insulated waveguides, used precisely to suppress bulk-EC sensitivity) is the functional analogue of encasing conductors in a jacket. The art did not teach away from separating the conductors from the soil — it taught the benefit of doing so.

Combination B: Hubbell (US 6,289,725) + TDR art + van Genuchten

Hubbell teaches a porous member that "impedes air… but permits water to move… until water pressure in the chamber equals water pressure in the sample" — i.e., the explicit equilibrium principle the '388 relies on, plus the heat-dissipation variant's normalized suction curve. Combine with the TDR leg and the van Genuchten leg, and Claim 1's functional chain is complete. This is a slightly weaker structural combination than A (Hubbell's porous body is a tensiometer cup, not an electrode-carrying tip), but it independently corroborates the equilibrium rationale and is useful as a secondary reference.

Combination C: EP 0 952 444 A1 (ETH Zürich) + Hasenbeck/Hortau

EP 0 952 444 ("Method and device for measuring at least one property of rocks and soils") is cited on the face of the '388 and appears in its ISR. I could not retrieve its disclosure. If, as its title indicates, it measures rock/soil properties via electromagnetic/TDR means, it supplies the TDR leg directly and squares the combination. I flag this as a gap: this reference should be pulled in full before it is relied on in a rejection.

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5. The one element with real fight in it — and why it still falls

The only element not squarely met by Hasenbeck/Hortau is pulse-field confinement: the '388 spec states that the jacket must be configured so

"the field generated when the conductors are energized by the pulses should not significantly extend outside the confines of the HN-CP jacket."

A patentee would argue this is the non-obvious "trick" that makes the TDR reading track the jacket rather than the soil. Response:

• The spec attributes confinement to routine design parameters — "the type of HN-CP material… and the jacket's cross-sectional area (in particular, the minimum distance between a conductor and the exterior surface)." Selecting a jacket thickness and permittivity to bound a near-field is ordinary engineering, not an unpredictable result.
• If an existing TDR probe is used (which the spec expressly contemplates), the spec says the conductor/pulse parameters "will already be established," leaving only jacket material/geometry to tune — an optimization.
• Insulated/coated TDR probes with controlled field penetration were already known in the soil-physics art.

So field confinement is a design choice within the skill of the art, not a patentable insight.

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6. Dependent claims — all obvious

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7. Claims 11 and 20 add nothing patentable

Claim 11 merely moves the delay computation from the TDR electronics into the computing device (record injection time + arrival time; compute delay downstream). Claim 20 is the same method steps. Splitting a computation across two boxes that already communicate is a functional allocation with no new technical effect → obvious as a matter of law (In re Kao; KSR).

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8. Secondary considerations (Graham factor 4)

• No evidence found of unexpected results. The '388's own "15 minutes to equilibrate" figure is a pre-soak convenience, not a surprising property.
• No nexus evidence located: no licenses, no industry praise, no copying, no long-felt-but-unsolved need tied to the jacketed-TDR feature specifically (long-felt need, if any, attaches to the generic salinity-independent matric-potential sensing already addressed by Hortau/US 11,085,893).
• Absent such evidence, the secondary considerations do not rebut the prima facie case.

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9. Summary judgment on obviousness

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10. Bottom line

US 11,353,388 sits at the intersection of two well-developed arts — (i) porous-body matric-potential sensors that equilibrate with soil (Hasenbeck; Hubbell; Hortau/Caron; Ragless) and (ii) TDR dielectric water-content measurement (Topp; insulated/coated TDR probes; US 2011/0057672 Skaling). The prior art already taught the porous body, the equilibration principle, electrodes inside the porous body, and the water-content↔matric-potential (van Genuchten) conversion. The claimed advance — measuring the jacket's water content by TDR pulse delay instead of by conduction/capacitance — is a predictable substitution of one known water-content measurement technique for another, motivated squarely by the salinity/texture-sensitivity problems of the conduction-type porous sensors, and yielding only the expected result. The composite "delay-to-matrix suction profile" is two conceded known relations chained together, optionally in a lookup table. A PHOSITA would have had both the motivation and the reasonable expectation of success, so independent claims 1, 11 and 20, and all dependent claims, would appear obvious under § 103 on the record I can see.

Confidence and gaps (stated, not hidden):

• High confidence in the Hasenbeck/Hortau/Hubbell/Topp/van Genuchten mapping (verbatim text and the patent's own admissions).
• Lower confidence for the TDR-leg references I could only identify by title — EP 0 952 444 A1, US 7,944,220 (Lock), US 2018/0368339 (Van Der Lee), US 5,898,310 (Liu), GB 0427659 (Delta-T), WO 2018/221051, KR 10-1502423. Their full texts must be pulled before any of them is relied on in a formal rejection; I have not invented their disclosures.
• Do not use US 11,085,893 (Skaling) as § 103 art without first confirming the § 102(b)(2)/common-inventor status — it is the same inventor's sibling and is most likely a background citation only.

Authoritative next steps: (1) pull the full text/claims of EP 0 952 444 A1 and the Delta-T "Moisture content sensor" reference — these are the most likely to directly disclose a TDR-in-a-dielectric-body arrangement; (2) retrieve the ISR/Written Opinion for PCT/US2020/066363 (listed on the face of the patent) to see what the examiner actually relied on; (3) confirm the § 102 status of US 11,085,893.