Flexible monitoring of location and motion

Details Flexible monitoring of location and motion Flexible monitoring of location and motion

1998-02-05

2001-01-30

Hsu, Alpus H. (Department: 2738)

Communications: electrical

Continuously variable indicating

With meter reading

C340S870030, C340S870030, C340S539230, C340S572800, C340S573300, C342S450000, C379S038000

Reexamination Certificate

active

06181253

ABSTRACT:

FIELD OF THE INVENTION
This application is a continuation in part of an earlier-filed patent application entitled “Flexible Site Arrestee Monitoring,” U.S. application Ser. No. 08/171,228, now U.S. Pat. No. 5,568,119. This invention relates to monitoring the location and movement of site arrestees or confinees in an arbitrarily defined area, using radiowave communications.
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
The annual growth of the population of prisoners within the state and federal prisons in the United States has averaged several percent per year for the last ten years. The total number of such prisoners exceeds 2 million. All felons convicted and sentenced for a crime are placed in one or another of these prisons, with little regard for the severity of the crime, whether the crime involved actual or threatened violence, or whether the crime was primarily directed against property. This approach has several disagreeable consequences. First, the federal and state governments cannot build prisons fast enough to accommodate the growing prison population, and some courts are treating prison overcrowding as a violation of the prisoners' constitutional rights. Second, the amount of fully-burdened money spent on new prisons, estimated to be $80,000-100,000 per cell, is now a substantial part of the annual budget of state and federal governments. The State of California now spends more on incarceration of prisoners than on education of University of California students. Third, prisons must be built in relatively large sizes to obtain economies of scale so that siting of such prisons is often a problem. Fourth, the average cost of providing room, board, recreation and security for a prisoner is now estimated to be about $24,000 per year, and this cost increases with inflation. Fifth, prisoners convicted of non-violent crimes are usually thrown together with, and are often preyed upon by, prisoners convicted of violent crimes. Sixth, prisoners who might still work and make a positive contribution to society are discouraged or prevented from doing so because of a lack of facilities needed for such activities.
Some workers have conceived other ways of handling some of these problems by providing portable jail or prison cells or by providing monitoring tags that must be worn by the prisoners. One early device, disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 3,478,344, issued to Schwitzgebel et al, provides an omni-directional transceiver carried on the waist and an encoded oscillator, uniquely identifying the wearer, that communicates with the transceiver. An inmate or other supervised person in a mental institution or a prison wears this apparatus, which receives signals transmitted from a nearby central station that interrogates the wearer's unit concerning the location of the unit. The unit responds automatically. The method used for determination of location of the wearer's unit might be triangulation, which would require provision of at least three additional stations. Miller, in U.S. Pat. No. 4,495,496, discloses a-similar approach for locating miners working a in different shafts in a mine. Engira, in U.S. Pat. No. 5,153,584, discloses a similar approach for monitoring the location and status of ambulatory electrocardiogram patients in a medical facility.
Schlatter et al, in U.S. Pat. No. 3,722,152, disclose a portable jail cell that can be transported as a disassembled unit and then assembled and used within a jail or other designated security area. The cell walls and floor are made of metal and concrete, and two or more such portable cells can be placed side-by-side to conserve space. A portable cell must be placed within a jail or other secured facility to provide overall security.
In U.S. Pat. No. 4,571,904, Kessler et al disclose a patient enclosure, to be placed within and form part of a hospital room, that operates similarly to the portable cell of Schlatter et al. The patient enclosure is a separate room-within-a-room that is cleared of all furniture except the patient's bed, may include padding on the walls, and is intended to be used for patients with brain damage who must be protected from further injury by their own actions.
A location determination (LD) unit for a vehicle, relying on radiowave triangulation signals provided by an Automatic Direction Finder system, is disclosed by Wanka in U.S. Pat. No. 4,596,988. The on-board unit transmits its present location when the LD unit is interrogated by receipt of a signal broadcast by a central station, which can track the locations of several vehicles simultaneously.
Gray et al disclose a vehicle security and tracking system in U.S. Pat. No. 4,651,157. An LD unit, installed in a vehicle to be tracked, receives Loran-C signals and transmits the information in these signals, unprocessed, to a central station for determination of the vehicle's present location by triangulation. The system also monitors the values of selected parameters associated with vehicle operation and transmits an advisory signal to the central station if the value of one or more of these parameters lies outside its permitted range.
A personnel monitoring system that uses the telephone for communication between the person whose location is monitored and a central station is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,747,120, issued to Foley. The monitored person wears a bracelet and is occasionally required to take some action, such as insertion of the bracelet into a decoder that transmits a coded verification signal to the central station over a dedicated phone line that is enabled only when used. The system is provided with some means that does not allow transmission of false signals to the central station.
Watson, in U.S. Pat. No. 4,777,477, discloses a location surveillance system for a designated person, such as a parolee, that detects departure of that person from a designated site, such as an enclosed building. The person wears a sensor-transmitter, a wrist band and a current-carrying loop wrapped around the body. The sensor senses when the person leaves the building and causes the transmitter to broadcast an alarm that is received by a receiver located within the building. The system senses an attempt to remove the loop from the body, using strain gauge apparatus, and transmits another alarm signal.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,918,425, issued to Greenberg et al, discloses a monitoring system for a selected object, such as a vehicle, a person, an animal or an inanimate object. The selected object carries a transponder, with a unique identification code, that receives an interrogation signal at regular intervals, specifying its ID code, from a base station, which may be portable. The transponder then transmits a coded signal that is received by the base station, indicating that the transponder is close enough to have received and understood the interrogation signal. If the base station fails to receive the coded signal responding to its own interrogation signal within a specified time interval, the base station can cause a search to be initiated for the object, which may be a child. A similar system, which relies upon a network of stations to receive and forward the response signal to a designated base station, is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,051,741, issued to Wesby.
A house arrest monitoring system, using an identification tag that is worn near the flesh of the prisoner under house arrest, is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,918,432, issued to Pauley et al. A tag worn by a prisoner transmits a signal having a unique code portion that identifies that prisoner so that several prisoners can be sequestered at one site. A field monitoring device (FMD), connected to a telephone line, receives and analyzes these transmitted signals and determines if (1) the prisoner is present at the site and (2) the tag is being continuously worn near the flesh of the wearer. If one or the other of these conditions is not true, the FMD communicates this information to a central processing unit (CPU), using the telephone line, and personnel at this CPU respond accordingly. The intensity of the signa

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