Patent Issued for Security sharing systems and methods (USPTO 11341838): United Services Automobile Association

2022 JUN 14 (NewsRx) -- By a News Reporter-Staff News Editor at Insurance Daily News -- A patent by the inventors Dixon, David Patrick (Boerne, TX, US), Dziuk, Janelle Denice (Falls City, TX, US), Guerra, Oscar (San Antonio, TX, US), Khmelev, Yevgeniy Viatcheslavovich (San Antonio, TX, US), Philbrick, Ashley Raine (San Antonio, TX, US), Pollack, Jeffrey Neal (San Antonio, TX, US), Russell, Ryan Thomas (San Antonio, TX, US), filed on April 10, 2020, was published online on May 24, 2022, according to news reporting originating from Alexandria, Virginia, by NewsRx correspondents.

Patent number 11341838 is assigned to United Services Automobile Association (San Antonio, Texas, United States).

The following quote was obtained by the news editors from the background information supplied by the inventors: “The present disclosure generally relates to home automation and monitoring, and more particularly, data sharing between home automation and/or home monitoring devices.

“Home automation and/or monitoring electronic devices, such as video-enabled doorbells, camera or video-enabled toys, motion detecting electronic devices, audio detecting electronic devices, or the like, are sometimes positioned within and/or around homes in neighborhoods, or within and/or around communities (e.g., in public shopping areas, such as a security video camera). Further, these devices increasingly use artificial intelligence, machine learning, and/or other analysis techniques to analyze image data, video data, audio data, and/or other sensor data gathered (e.g., recorded data set(s)), and determine from the analysis whether activity is occurring within the monitored area. However these devices do not yet communicate with devices not owned by a common entity. For example, a device owned by a first operator does not communicate with a device owned by a second operator. Consequently, abnormal patterns, alerts, and/or monitoring data are inefficiently used to monitor a home and/or a community space because there is no way to automatically aggregate monitoring data, nor provide a platform for automatic and collective analysis of the aggregated data.”

In addition to the background information obtained for this patent, NewsRx journalists also obtained the inventors’ summary information for this patent: “One or more specific embodiments of the present disclosure will be described below. In an effort to provide a concise description of these embodiments, all features of an actual implementation may not be described in the specification. It should be appreciated that in the development of any such actual implementation, as in any engineering or design project, numerous implementation-specific decisions must be made to achieve the developers’ specific goals, such as compliance with system-related and business-related constraints, which may vary from one implementation to another. Moreover, it should be appreciated that such a development effort might be complex and time consuming, but would nevertheless be a routine undertaking of design, fabrication, and manufacture for those of ordinary skill having the benefit of this disclosure.

“When introducing elements of various embodiments of the present disclosure, the articles “a,” “an,” and “the” are intended to mean that there are one or more of the elements. The terms “comprising,” “including,” and “having” are intended to be inclusive and mean that there may be additional elements other than the listed elements. Additionally, it should be understood that references to “one embodiment” or “an embodiment” of the present disclosure are not intended to be interpreted as excluding the existence of additional embodiments that also incorporate the recited features.

“Home and business owners may monitor and/or enhance their respective personal properties using electronic networked monitoring devices, such as surveillance cameras, video-enabled doorbells, audio-enabled recording and/or listening devices, smart-enabled outlets, home- or commercial-automation devices, or the like. These networked monitoring devices may communicatively couple to proprietary software and perform operations related to the proprietary software (e.g., a video-enabled doorbell may upload a recorded image in response to an operator instructing the hardware to upload the image to the proprietary software). Furthermore, the networked monitoring devices may couple to a communication network (e.g., wired network, wireless network) and may transmit owned information (recorded data sets, generated alerts, indications of detected activity (e.g., may or may not correspond to an alert, or the like) via the communication network. The owned information may generally refer to data or information gathered via the networked monitoring devices, and thus the data or information gathered may belong to an owner of the networked monitoring device (e.g., owned information).

“It may be advantageous to cross-reference owned information between the networked monitoring devices and/or between monitoring systems of networked monitoring devices. Operation and/or monitoring of a home (or business and/or community-region) may improve from this comparison of owned information. For example, operation and/or monitoring of a home may improve from referencing a first recorded data set (or alert) and comparing the first recorded data set (or alert) to a second recorded data set (or alert), where the first and second recorded data sets (or alerts) may be from any of the networked monitoring devices.

“The above-described systems and methods may be an improvement to monitoring systems that use networked monitoring devices, such as home automation systems and/or home monitoring systems. Each networked monitoring device may be communicatively coupled to an aggregation software managed by a common provider, referred to herein as a central control system. Activity monitored, and captured in the recorded data sets, via networked monitoring devices of a first monitoring system may be shared with the central control system. It is noted that examples used herein usually refer to recorded data sets and alerts as examples of owned information transmitted to the central control system, but it should be understood that a variety of suitable data may transmit between monitoring systems and the central control system. Each respective networked monitoring device may correspond to sharing preferences (e.g., permissions) that the central control system may interpret to determine mutual permissions between networked monitoring devices and/or between monitoring systems. Permissions of each monitoring system may be established between the central control system and the monitoring system, such as by way of agreement, contract, legal agreement, legal contract, user agreement, or the like. Additionally or alternatively, the permissions may be settings that may change over a lifetime and/or operation duration of the monitoring system, such as in response to a trigger event (e.g., a threshold number of locally-detected events) and/or in response to operator input. Furthermore, occupants of a household, or a household as a whole, may each correspond to a profile maintained for that operator. Each profile may include indications of these permissions. Profiles may also indicate a ranking of priority of household occupants such as to provide a system to provide seniority to defining permissions of a household monitoring system.”

The claims supplied by the inventors are:

“1. A system, comprising: a first monitoring system associated with a first set of data sharing permissions; and a central control system configured to: receive a first alert regarding the first monitoring system, wherein the first alert indicates that an abnormal event, nefarious event, or otherwise detectable operation was detected via the first monitoring system; determine a permission based at least in part on the first set of data sharing permissions; determine that sharing a recorded data set from the first monitoring system associated with the first alert is permitted based at least in part on the permission; receive the larger data set from the first monitoring system; share the recorded data set at least in part by transmitting the recorded data set from the first monitoring system, wherein the recorded data set comprises a subset of recorded data from a larger data set, and wherein the central control system is configured to separate the subset of recorded data from the larger data set based at least in part on the permission at least in part by: determining a time that the first alert was generated by the first monitoring system; and extracting the recorded data set from the larger data set on behalf of the first monitoring system based at least in part on the time that the first alert was generated by the first monitoring system.

“2. The system of claim 1, comprising a second monitoring system associated with a second set of data sharing permissions, wherein the first monitoring system and the second monitoring system are configured to monitor separate households, and wherein at least the first set of data sharing permissions are defined via an agreement between the first monitoring system and the central control system.

“3. The system of claim 1, wherein the first monitoring system is configured to transmit the recorded data set to a second monitoring system via the central control system.

“4. The system of claim 1, wherein the central control system is configured to: probe the first monitoring system for a locally-stored historical alert log associated with the time in response to receiving the first alert; associate the locally-stored historical alert log with the larger data set to generate an alert-data correlation data set; and save, in a data store, the alert-data correlation data set.

“5. The system of claim 4, wherein the central control system is configured to: receive a second alert; determine whether one or more properties of the second alert are substantially similar to one or more properties of at least one respective alert from the alert-data correlation data set; elevate a priority of the second alert and a priority of the at least one respective alert in response to determining that one or more properties are substantially similar between the second alert and the at least one respective alert; and notify the first monitoring system of the elevated priority of the at least one respective alert.

“6. A method, comprising: receiving an alert and a recorded data set from a first monitoring system; receiving a first set of permissions from the first monitoring system; determining a permission associated with sharing of the recorded data set based at least in part on the first set of permissions; determining that sharing of at least a portion of the recorded data set from the first monitoring system to a target electronic device is permitted based at least in part on the permission; and based upon determining that the sharing of the at least portion of the recorded data set from the first monitoring system to the target electronic device is permitted, sharing the at least a portion of the recorded data set to the target electronic device at least in part by: determining whether the alert is able to be correlated to other alerts by comparing one or more properties of the alert to one or more properties of historical alert records stored in a data store; in response to determining the alert is correlated to at least one additional alert from the historical alert records and in response to determining that sharing between the first monitoring system and the target electronic device is permitted based at least in part on the permission, determining a pattern of alerts; and alerting the first monitoring system of the pattern of alerts.

“7. The method of claim 6, comprising sharing a second recorded data set by transmitting the second recorded data set from a second monitoring system to the first monitoring system, wherein the first monitoring system is configured to provide an enhanced response to the alert based at least in part on an analysis of the second recorded data set.

“8. The method of claim 6, comprising storing at least the first set of permissions into a data store such that the first set of permissions is able to be retrieved without communication with the first monitoring system.

“9. The method of claim 6, wherein the at least a portion of the recorded data set comprises an image, video-recording, audio-recording, or any combination of the image, the video-recording, and the audio-recording, corresponding to the alert.

“10. The method of claim 6, wherein the comparing of the one or more properties of the alert to the one or more properties of the historical alert records stored in the data store comprises comparing at least one property of the alert with at least in property of an alert from a different monitoring device.

“11. The method of claim 6, comprising sharing the at least a portion of the recorded data set with a second monitoring system, wherein the second monitoring system is configured to render the at least a portion of the recorded data set on a graphical user interface.

“12. A system, comprising: a first monitoring system; a second monitoring system associated with a permission; and a central control system configured to: receive an alert from the first monitoring system; determine the permission of the second monitoring system; determine that sharing a household asset of the second monitoring system is permitted based at least in part on the permission, wherein in the household asset comprises a utility connection; and share the household asset between the second monitoring system and the first monitoring system at least in part by: coupling the utility connection of the second monitoring system to the first monitoring system by securely connecting the first monitoring system to a wireless internet utility of the second monitoring system without revealing login credentials to the first monitoring system, or operating a first switch to connect the first monitoring system to a wired utility of the second monitoring system, or operating a second switch to connect the first monitoring system to a wireless utility of the second monitoring system, or any combination of: coupling the utility connection of the second monitoring system to the first monitoring system by securely connecting the first monitoring system to the wireless internet utility of the second monitoring system without revealing login credentials to the first monitoring system, operating the first switch to connect the first monitoring system to the wired utility of the second monitoring system, and operating the second switch to connect the first monitoring system to the wireless utility of the second monitoring system.

“13. The system of claim 12, wherein the household asset corresponds to a networked monitoring device.

“14. The system of claim 13, wherein the central control system is configured to share the networked monitoring device between the second monitoring system and the first monitoring system by permitting recorded data set transmission between the first monitoring system and the second monitoring system.

“15. The system of claim 13, wherein the permission is configured to indicate to the central control system that sharing of the household asset of the second monitoring system is permitted with the first monitoring system and is not permitted with a third monitoring system.”

URL and more information on this patent, see: Dixon, David Patrick. Security sharing systems and methods. U.S. Patent Number 11341838, filed April 10, 2020, and published online on May 24, 2022. Patent URL: http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=11341838.PN.&OS=PN/11341838RS=PN/11341838

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