TECH OFFERS

In recent times, more restaurant customers prefer to place their food orders on their own, using mobile apps, due to the convenience of doing so. Many restaurant owners also prefer this method of food ordering because it helps to reduce waiters’ workload and issues arising from customer orders, such as wrong food orders due to miscommunication between the customer and the waiter. Such a solution is also useful in achieving social distancing, as required by the Covid-19 situation. Restaurant owners, staff, and customers are experiencing the benefits that digitalisation is bringing to the traditional way of working in a restaurant, hence it is highly anticipated that they will accept more digital solutions in the near future. This technology offer is a menu personalisation system, which allows restaurant customers to generate a personalised menu that is formulated based on the customer's personal information and the restaurant’s available menu items and ingredients.

Restaurant search engines based on various user ratings are available on many websites or mobile applications. Most of these search engines rank the restaurants based on reviewers’ input, or by the user’s location or proximity to the restaurants.   This technology offer is a restaurant search engine that provides some additional filtering options compared to conventional restaurant search engines. For example, the filtering function allows the users to search for restaurants based on the ratings made by only native, local customers. With such finely-tuned filters, this technology offer helps users to efficiently search for restaurants and food, with very specific criteria.

Conventional diagnostic imaging of the skin involves the use of dermatoscopes. Dermatoscopes use skin surface microscopy to examine dermal and sub-dermal tissues to diagnose skin problems. However, these devices can be costly and provide a limited view of the immediate skin surface. This limitation meant that dermatoscopes have to be used in direct contact with the patient's skin. Because of this, they can only be used to image patients in the same physical location as the clinician conducting the examination. The overall result is that only a tiny portion of the global dermatology patient-base can be reached cost-effectively and efficiently. Telemedicine and telehealth network operations are rapidly developing ways to address patients broadly and at lower costs for them and their care providers. Yet, such tools neither deliver desmatoscope-like functionality nor improved it in way that it allows patients' skins to be examined and analysed during an online medical consultation with a general practitioner. In order to facilitate remote skin disease diagnosis, the use of software is required to acquire and share images in real-time and ideally, by the patients themselves. This software enables patients to take their medical sub-skin images with their mobile, tablet or laptop cameras, and securely share it with doctors. Crucially, dermatoscopy images can also be used with the technology to improve diagnostic accuracy. This technology is intended to position itself as a technology which when scaled-up, could allow for products that can enable optical biopsy and phototherapy. 

This technology offer is a healthcare-grade emotion recognition AI with close to 10 years of R&D and commercial use that can discern emotions, high accuracy, and is capable of extracting concealed feelings. The strength of the algorithm arises from the volume and granularity of data collected, enabling the AI engine to detect and assess a broad range of emotions with precision. There are annotated datasets from various fields of psychology; after extensive training and validation, the algorithm recognises the minutiae scale of emotions for applications across platforms. This technology offer can be used in mental health analysis, vehicle safety, education, unbiased emotion feedback for advertising and public security. It has been deployed for audience emotion measurement, customer satisfaction, human resources and training applications, etc. The technology owner is keen to out-license this technology and/or work with technology collaborators who can further co-develop this technology. E.g., companies with relevant hardware, and require lightweight emotion recognition AI at the edge to bring new products/services into the market, such as non-intrusive emotion recognition cameras in shopping malls.

Conventional methods of 2D cell culture have limitations. They do not completely mimic the 3D tissues and organs of the human body. 3D bioprinting offers a way to generate 3D cultures in forms of spheroids (from cancer cells) and embryoid bodies (from stem cells). 3D cell culture is able to better mimic the in vivo conditions of human tissues and organs. Spheroids behave similar to tumors and make good cancer models for studying oncology and testing drugs. Embryoid bodies from stem cells mimic the development of embryos and can be used to study the effects of drugs on the three germ layers of the body – ectoderm, endoderm and mesoderm. The hanging-drop method, a manual generation of such 3D cell structures, is labor-intensive and not amenable to up-scaling in biotech industry. This technology overcomes the forementioned limitations by offering an automated, cost-effective, novel bioprinter that can rapidly generate 3D cultures of various cell types with multiple applications in drug discovery, cosmetic testing, tumor studies etc. Unlike existing technologies that generate structural parts, this bioprinter can produce functional components like organoids and embryoids, which can be further developed into functional tissues. This feature offers means to create artificial yet biologically-relevant functional tissues.  This bioprinter is developed in-house and extensively tested out over three years. Target users are cell culture researchers and companies engaging in clinical trials of novel drugs and vaccines. Partners are sought for technology development and commercialization collaborations, including 3D bioprinting solution providers, robotics industry, clinical trial companies etc.

The skin is constantly bombarded by different environmental factors, including UV radiation and pollution, that damage its DNA. Repairing DNA damage is vital to skin health. However, the skin’s natural repair mechanisms eventually become overwhelmed by the constant DNA damage and this causes inflammation and premature skin aging, eventually leading to wrinkling, age spots, loss of elasticity, and other associated symptoms. This premature skin aging negatively impacts skin health and decreases quality of life. The patented technology enhances the body's own intrinsic ability to restore itself to health - an ability that lessens with time & environmental stressors - by targeting DNA damage, the cause of premature skin aging.

Direct visual SLAM is the state of the art in 3D computer vision. As compared to traditional feature-based SLAM, this Direct Sparse Odometry approach works reliably in featureless, repetitive and complex outdoor environments. The technology offer presents a software that adopts direct visual SLAM. It can turn 2D images from off-the-shelf cameras into a precise understanding of the position and 3D environment, thereby enabling accurate, robust and safe navigation of autonomous robots or advanced spatial intelligence applications. Additionally, it does not require expensive systems, such as LiDARs, and is more independent and reliable than Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) or HD maps. Besides cameras, the input from IMUs, GNSS, wheel odometry or LiDAR may be optionally fused for increased reliability or to address edge cases of particular applications.

Heavy metals are highly toxic contaminants found in industrial wastewater that may find their way into drinking water sources through unregulated discharge from industrial plants. Even at low concentrations, heavy metals can disrupt a human body's normal physiological activities and can accumulate in certain organs causing a range of chronic diseases. As such, heavy metal pollution has drawn attention from regulatory agencies throughout the world that has set increasingly stringent standards to curb heavy metal discharge into water bodies and membrane technology will be able to treat these wastewaters. This technology relates to nanofiltration (NF) membrane molecularly designed to remove heavy metals such as Zinc, Nickel and Lead at higher rejection rates compared to conventional NF membranes. This is done through functionalizing specialized polymers on a P84 polyimide substrate which provides an extra means to remove heavy metals through adsorption. 

This technology relates to a series of block co-polymers that have the superior anti-fouling capability made through green synthesis by using water as a solvent. One of the co-polymers has been grafted onto the selective layer of thin film composite (TFC) membranes as a demonstration of its anti-fouling function. The resultant membranes show pure water permeability of up to 10 LMH/bar, NaCl rejection of ~98%, and high resistance to alginate and protein fouling. Moreover, no significant fouling is observed when realistic feed from the local RO plant is tested for 10 days.