Petent Pending™: Laptop or Keyboard Simulating Pet Bed
Welcome to the second exciting instalment of Petent Pending™, Russell IP’s new series of pet-related patent posts! 🐾 Each post will feature a patent application or granted patent relating to technology for or involving pets 🐕🐈. From time to time, we’ll also try to coax a furry Russell IP representative into making an appearance and offering their take on the featured pet tech!
Introducing Jamaal Speights and their pet bed
Our second pet-related patent describes a supurrb piece of hardware for anyone with a fluffy coworker at their home office: Jamaal Kinney Speights’s “Laptop or keyboard simulating pet bed” (US10398125).
Speights sets the scene for the invention in the “Discussion of Related Art” section of the patent:
“Pet owners, and owners of cats in particular, know that upon sitting down at a computer their pet frequently desires to lay directly on the computer keyboard. While pet owners frequently attribute this behavior to a desire for affection, or conversely to a desire to annoy the pet owner, more likely the draw of the keyboard has more to do with warmth and proximity to interesting activity. Since people with pets sitting at a computer keyboard typically need to use the keyboard, there is a need for a device that simulates a keyboard but provides for greater warmth and for interesting sound, light and tactile effects to divert their pet.”
Speights’s pet bed has many useful features for distracting an interfurring feline, including:
- a pressure-activated switch to switch on a heating element, a keyboard sound simulating device, a vibration device and/or an illumination device when a pet’s weight is applied to the bed;
- a fabric portion “to further aid in the comfort and warmth of the pet”; and
- a simulated laptop display.
Russell IP pet Oscar thinks this all sounds great, though he suspects Iain may find watching Oscar being entertained by the interactive pet bed just as distracting as having Oscar on the actual keyboard in the first place!
We’ll be back soon for another canter through a pet-related patent document. In the meantime, if you have any questions about pet-related IP, please feel free to get in touch with your usual Russell IP contact, email [email protected], or use our contact form by clicking the button below.
