ALEXANDRIA, Va., July 7 -- United States Patent no. 12,677,392, issued on July 7, was assigned to Dell Products LP (Round Rock, Texas).

"Autonomous environmental monitoring device" was invented by Neal Beard (Austin, Texas), Padmanabhan Narayanan (Chennai, India) and Vamshidhar Varre (Hyderabad, India).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "An autonomous environmental monitoring device includes a chassis that is configured to be housed in a computing device. The chassis includes a computing device connector that connects to the computing device and houses an autonomous environmental monitoring subsystem that is coupled to the computing device connector, at least one environmental monitoring sensor dev...