Week 2: The Landscape Survey of US-Sino Patents Regarding Neuroimaging Technology

sup nerds

Today is approaching the end of the second week of my senior project, and my departure for China to begin the second half of my work. Because I’m leaving soon to work on the main chunk of this project, I decided to go for a less research-orieinted plan for this week, and instead focused on learning many of the basic skills I will be using next week.

The most important skill for a research project such as this is, obviously, the ability to do research. This may seem simple enough; after all, we have the entire internet at our disposal. Any researcher can find anything they want just by doing a quick google search. What I spent the first half of the week learning is how to use google better. Things like how you can put words in quotations to make them exact phrases required, or behind a hyphen to exclude them from the search.

In addition, I listened to a lecture from a patent bar exam course on doing research for patents. This lecture was given by a patent bar examiner for law school students studying for the exam. This lecture gave an overview on general topics such as what patent prosecution is, how to obtain a patent, how patents interact with patent offices and the patent landscape, and more. Furthermore, the lecture broke down a lot of the jargon used in patent law, an important step as patent law is infamous for having many special definitions for phrases.

With what I learned from my studying and the lecture, I used the second half of the week to do research on my own to find patents and such. Since I have little experience looking through specialized databases or anything of the sort, I simply used Google Patents. During the second half, I found two interesting patents that I read through. The first of which was a paper on the use of Electroencephalogram (EEG) in diagnosing ADHD. The second of which was a collection of data from a study on ADHD brains using various techniques. Most of the two papers were just lists of discoveries rather than anything building up to a big point.

Anyway, that’s it for this week. I’ll see you next week for yet another update. Peace.