A Patent Trend Analysis for Technological Convergence of IoT and Wearables

Abstract

This study aims at analyzing the convergence of Internet-of-Things and wearables technologies using cooperative patent classification(CPC). CPC, introduced to an increasing number of technological fields of Korean patents, is expected to be widely used in Patent Informatics because the classification codes in CPC are more specific than those of IPC, which reflect the characteristics of technologies in detail with accuracy. CPC has seldom been used up to date and most of the previous researches on technological convergence used IPC. As a pre-analysis step for analyzing the trend of technological convergence of IoT and wearables, CPC and IPC codes assigned to each patent were compared. By applying association rule mining to the analysis of CPC codes, we identified the technological fields where convergence frequently takes place and examined the trend of technological convergence over time.