Control Data Corporation

Matthew F Kern

Joseph A Damoci

Russell J Welsh

John D Fourdraine

Arthur W Allison, Iii

William H Forlines

Carl B Gipson

David M Myers

Apparatus in an automatic telecommunications system which communicates between a central location and at least one remote location over the switched telephone network, senses changes in loading of the telephone line which correspond to a telephone going off-hook, to serve as an indication that a telephone has gone off-hook and to cause the automatic telecommunications system to relinquish its use of the telephone line, or not to go off-hook if a telephone is in use.

Method and apparatus for determining when a telephone handset is off-hook

A system is disclosed which may be used for collecting television channel tuning data, household purchase data, VCR channel usage data and the like; on site at a plurality of preselected households, wherein the system concentrates and transmits the collected data to a central site in a fault tolerant manner, transparent to the occupants of the household. The novel system features a hub and spoke architecture for effecting communications between the central site and each household (remote site). The hub and spoke architecture at each remote site comprises a hub unit, and a set of spoke meters. The hub unit is adapted to be coupled, in a variety of ways, to a set of metering devices, one or more of which is coupled to one or more television receivers and/or cable television converters. Not all of the metering devices need be coupled to the television receiver or cable converter, e.g., stand alone purchase meters and wands may be coupled to the hub. The meters may be polled systematically, e.g. on a virtually continuous or periodic basis, by the hub, which then collects and concentrates the data acquired by each meter. As a result of this arrangement standard communications and data transmission 'smarts' can be used at the meter level, meter storage requirements are kept to a minimum and no meter communications programming is required. Additionally, the hub can be easily reprogrammed by downloading control software from the central site without having to modify the meters.

Distributed monitoring system

Growing community of inventors

Catonsville, MD, United States of America

Matthew F Kern