TECH OFFERS

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.

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.    

This invention relates to a polyacrylonitrile (PAN)-based membrane suitable for dehumidification and oxygen enrichment, with a proprietary PDMS selective layer. The substrate material is PAN, which is a low cost and commonly available polymer for membrane fabrication. The membrane is made by coating the substrate with the selective layer. The membrane may also be suitable for gas separation, air separation, paraffin-olefin separation, oxygen enrichment, CO2 capture, hydrocarbon recovery, and volatile organic compounds separation.

Graphene-derived permeable membrane with ion selectivity permits outgoing and incoming of selective ions (e.g. positively or negatively charged in a system). They consist of ion channels that facilitate the efficient separation and transport of different ions. As such, these membranes are employed to produce required ions via electrolysis of salt solution during a process. The technology relates to the use of functionalized graphene oxide (GO) based membranes so as to separate ions from the feed stream for the purpose of kidney dialysis, nanofiltration or ion exchange. The membrane is a graphene-based membrane with an electrical charge, in which layers of graphene-based material are stacked together, with one or more nano-channels between neighboring layers.

Isopropanol (IPA) is an important solvent and cleaning agent with wide applications in semiconductor, microelectronic and pharmaceutical industries. IPA is primarily produced by combining water and propene in a hydration reaction. The IPA produced is usually in a mixture with water and distillation is used to obtain IPA with 87.9% purity. Higher purity IPA can only be achieved through azeotropic distillation with cyclohexane or diisopropyl ether. In both cases, a large amount of energy is used for the purification process. To lower purification cost, pervaporation, a membrane‐based technology, is a promising method because of its easy operation, low energy consumption and small footprint. Pervaporation is a membrane process whereby the permeate side is under vacuum and water is vapourised as it passes through the membrane from the feed side to the permeate side. Pervaporation is able to provide a high level of separation efficiency for azeotropic mixtures of alcohols and water to obtain the purity required for the alcohols. This technology relates to a thin film composite (TFC) membranes on ceramic substrates (referred to as ceramic TFC membranes thereafter) for pervaporation dehydration of organics. The ceramic TFC membrane can be obtained by using interfacial polymerization on a microfiltration ceramic membrane. Compared to commercially available ceramic and polymeric membranes for pervaporation, it has extremely high water flux compared to other ceramic/polymeric membranes for pervaporation making it suitable for high volume processing.

Laser-cooled and trapped strontium is an important candidate for applications in quantum sensing and metrology, quantum computing, and quantum simulations of complex systems. Usually, the production of cold samples of strontium in a magneto-optical trap (MOT) involves a bulky setup that requires a significant investment in resources, time and expertise to assemble and maintain. This technology offer is a compact turnkey MOT device which requires less maintenance, and relies on a simpler atomic source for strontium, which is based on thermal ablation of pure strontium by a high-power focused laser beam.  A proof-of-principle has been obtained for the thermal ablation source, trapping cold strontium atoms in a MOT directly from the strontium vapour released during the ablation process. The technology owner is planning to develop a prototype of the turnkey cold strontium setup, and believes that this would be of interest to potential technology collaborators such as researchers and companies working on quantum technologies. The technology owner is keen to out-license this technology, as well as explore technology co-development, including with potential collaborators with other application ideas.