Indian companies filed more than 1330 patents in the United States in the year 2018-19. Of this, around 60 per cent were technology patents with Artificial Intelligence(AI) taking the lead. According to the recent report, ‘Emerging Technologies: Leading the Technology IP Creation Bandwagon for India’, released by industry body Nasscom, patents in AI increased 83 per cent from 330 during 2015-18 to 604 during 2015-19. Al domain accounted for the most number of granted patents across all emerging technologies. 

While AI accounted for the majority number of patents, Cloud Computing took the top spot in terms of growth, says the report. IT giant Infosys, e-commerce company Myntra and hardware design company Futuristic Labs were some of them to file for AI-related patents. Infosys has filed patents on natural language processing for recognising the names of person, place or object, in digital documents. Myntra has sought a patent for a deep learning model that helps the users to view the product in different colours without manually looking for colour variants. 

Futuristic Labs has filed a patent for AI-driven automated cooking system and content creation and management firm Vphrase Analytics has filed a patent for securing data, based on geolocation, network or device parameters using AI, data analytics and machine learning tools. 

Machine Learning patents lead. 

In healthcare, software applications, business analytics, text/data mining sectors, Machine Learning patents took the lead. Software applications head as the top application area across AI. Patents related to heartbeat monitoring, digital health assessment, classification of stress level in humans, activity recognition and behaviour analysis, medical imaging and other such health-related parameters top the healthcare sector. Under software applications, patents were filed for data validation, automated bug fixing, the database for automated data extraction and automated testing of software applications. Patents for network fraud detection in the healthcare industry, textile industry and aerial inspection/surveillance for monitoring land use were filed for the industrial sectors category.

In IoT based patents, sensors took the lead. IoT patents were filed across a broad range of applications, including healthcare devices, smart wearable devices, smart home appliances, home automation, industrial application, and so on. 

Another interesting find is that, while technology patents increased from 53.8 per cent to 59.4 per cent, there was a decrease in the number of non-technology patents filed. Non-technology patents declined from 46.2 per cent to 40.6 per cent.

“With digital transformation making inroads across industry verticals, focus on new and emerging technologies such as AI, Cloud and IoT seem to be the ‘Innovation Mantra’ for technology companies across the globe,” stated Debjani Ghosh, President, Nasscom in the report.