TECH OFFERS

Core body temperature is an important vital sign indicating the health status of a person. This technology offer is a wearable core body temperature sensor for continuous and non-invasive measurements. The miniaturized sensor is ideal for the integration into wearable devices and med-tech/health-tech devices with skin contact. Both stand-alone solution and integrated circuit (IC) level solutions are available.

Antimicrobial resistance developed due to the overuse of conventional antimicrobial agents in surface coatings and consumer products is a global concern for treatment of infectious diseases in recent years. To address this concern, US FDA has banned the use of a number of conventional antimicrobial agents in consumer and healthcare products such as hand soaps and hand sanitisers. This raises the importance of alternative antimicrobial agents in antiseptic products. Photoactive antimicrobial agents are effective alternatives which produce highly reactive oxygen species (ROS) when activated by light. These reactive oxygen species display broad-spectrum biocidal activity that destroy microbes by a multi-targeted killing mechanism, which may limit the development of antimicrobial tolerance or resistance. The researchers have developed a stabilised form of a plant-based antimicrobial agent to protect it from environmental degradation. The enhanced environmental stability of this natural photoactive antimicrobial agent has made it suitable to be incorporated in various materials for the self-sterilising product applications and may provide a “greener solution” to limit the spread of pathogens and transmission of infections by indirect contact.

This technology offer is a sub-nanowatt microcontroller that can continue to operate even when the device battery runs out of energy. A novel power management technique allows the microcontroller to self-start and continue to function under dim light conditions, without any battery assistance, by using a tiny on-chip solar cell. As such, this design is battery-indifferent. This design can facilitate the size reduction of batteries used to power IoT sensor nodes, making them potentially 10 times smaller and cheaper to produce.

With increasing reliance on robots within 4 walled environments for picking and the like, the task of the robotics fleet has increased significantly in difficulty. Traditional robotics fleet management systems are system-dependent and do not account for dynamic changes on the ground. This technology offer presents a robot agnostic system that allows for superior fleet optimization for warehouse robots in route planning, job allocation and decision making in potential gridlock situations. With past applications for fleets of 2 to over 100 robots in size in warehouses carrying fast-moving items to semiconductor manufacturing facilities, the robot controller has outperformed OEM robot fleet management software in excess of 40% in total job-completion times. Additional simulation function of the robot controller allows non-robot and robot users alike to determine how many robots to purchase for their fleet according to layout and volumes of current and future facility.

With increasing demand and shorter fulfilment times for orders across different industries, the need to fill these orders more efficiently through optimal manpower optimisation and increased picking efficiency in warehouses is thus necessary. The cloud-based/on-premise computing solution for pick-path optimization aims to optimise the least efficient and mostly costly part of the order fulfillment process. The technology improves efficiency of pickers' routes within 4 walls of a warehouse, allowing for close to 17-34% increased efficiency or less time spent on similar picking operations, allowing increased number of picks with the current capacity of the picking operations. More picks with the same manpower means faster fulfillment times and more revenue generated with the same resources. 

An on-going challenge is the lagging indicators and paper trails resulting from manufacturing-related data. This translates into losses that could have been avoided if only more up-to-date information was available. This technology offers real-time visibility and predictive analytics by retro-fitting manufacturing operations with sensor-based platforms. The collection of valuable manufacturing-related data can be analysed to amplify and streamline company operations. Powered by our proprietary intelligent sensor network, the insights generated from both data collection and analytics allows users to simplify the manufacturing operations decision making process and achieve optimal throughput efficiency. As a result, leading indicators are obtained contributing towards a firm's competitiveness.

Within the solar energy industry, there is a general motto of "install it and forget it " for solar energy. This idea is largely derived from the research and reliability studies performed on the PV panels themselves but not the PV system as a whole (including inverters and other components). Other PV system components such as inverters contribute to a significant amount of power loss and the losses may vary based on different models of inverters. This technology relates to a method that can reduce measurement errors and achieve normalization among inverters used in PV systems in line with Class A of the updated IEC 61724-1 standard  With this method, the inverter-induced error can be reduced by up to 4.46%. The technology owner is looking for licensing partners to commercialize the test method.    

Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), one form of advanced engineering simulation is widely used to design and model complex industrial applications. Examples of the use of CFD include modelling occupant’s thermal comfort in buildings design, studying aerodynamic effect for vehicle design and analysing energy distribution in industrial processes. In industrial processes, small amount of optimisation can provide large energy savings. While CFD provides high accuracy, the simulation time requires long hours that could sometimes take weeks to produce the result. As such, it is pertinent to find alternative simulation techniques which offers faster simulation time while achieving good accuracy.The technology provider described herein has developed a collection of AI models which can replace CFD solvers to obtain faster results without increasing more computer power. Used case applied thus far includes chemical mixing processes and motorbike simulation. The technology provider is seeking for partners to collaborate through applying this simulation technique in more industry applications.

Trade finance is a highly complex process involving dozens of parties and documents. It is a paper intensive industry with significant overhead costs, and it is plagued with documentation discrepancies, delays in trade financing and the risk of fraud.The World Trade Organization (WTO) estimates small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) have $1.5 trillion in annual unmet trade financing needs and have 60% of their financing requests rejected by banks.Our custom built, blockchain-enabled, end-to-end global trading and trade finance solution addresses this unmet market need by joining forces with alternative lenders and private equity managers to provide financing to these SMEs that are underserviced by the banks. This shortfall has been caused by banks exiting the industry as their compliance costs and Basel III capital requirements increased.The platform brings all stakeholders (traders, lenders, insurers, shippers, etc.) to a trade transaction together – providing solutions through its module offerings that include trade finance, trade discovery, insurance, logistics and risk management. SMEs can pursue opportunities in trade and trade finance with more confidence and lenders can originate loans from anywhere in the world with more knowledge.In using the platform, trade processes are being digitized. This streamlines transactions, reduces overhead costs, enhances compliance, and reduces risk for its customers. It allows all parties to a given transaction to have complete knowledge of its status and progress. This brings the much-needed visibility across the trade chain and increased efficiency to the trade and trade finance processes.