SFU develops super sensor devices
Bozena Kaminska, 778.782.6855 (w), 604.506.1214 (cell), kaminska@sfu.ca
Carol Thorbes, PAMR, 778.782.3035, cthorbes@sfu.ca
Imagine being able to adjust your home furnace, check whether your arteries are plugging up and pinpoint the location of your child, all with a tap of the same quarter-sized brooch.
That’s becoming doable with next-generation wireless sensor technology developed by SFU engineering professor Bozena Kaminska and CiBER (Centre for Integrative Bio-Engineering Research). Kaminska, a Canada Research Chair in Wireless Sensor Networks, founded the SFU-based, mixed-technology, electronics developer.
CiBER’s work first made international news three years ago when it unveiled a wearable wireless cardiac monitoring and diagnostic sensor. The miniature device is embedded in a polymer-based Band Aid worn on the chest.
“Since then, we have further honed our miniature sensors for secure document storage and transmission,” says Kaminska.
“They can be used to track and detect the identity of objects and people. At the National Research Council (NRC) in Ottawa, we’re incorporating this ability into sensor-based wireless applications to create smart homes and save energy.”
Not only do these sensors have highly sophisticated health, athletic, security and energy monitoring applications, they can also communicate with each other through a CiBER-created solar-powered, wireless, mesh network connected to the Internet.
Through a project led by Marcin Marzencki, a post-doctoral fellow in Kaminska’s lab, CiBER has successfully tested several of its network installations in the Okanagan and at the NRC.
The Fraser Health Burnaby Hospital and other health care facilities are clinically testing CiBER’s sensors and networking capabilities for medical purposes and evaluating them for athletic and fitness applications.
“Other research groups are using our technology as a platform to build their work on,” says Kaminska, “and that’s largely thanks to CMC Microsystems.”
The Queens University-based, non-profit microelectronics fabricator and distributor helps university researchers, nationally, commercialize their inventions.
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Backgrounder: SFU develops super sensor devices
CMC Microsystems, which just got $40 million in new federal funding, helped CiBER develop a prototype of its highly integrated micro-sensor technology on a flexible substrate and is helping to commercialize the invention.
Kaminska, a vice-chair of CMC’s board of directors and a long time technical advisor to the company, says IDme Technologies is her latest spin-off company.
Clint Landrock, one of Kaminska’s graduate students, and Doug Blakeway, a Surrey-based wireless technology inventor and member of SFU Surrey’s Business Advisory Council, helped Kaminskia co-found IDme.
The spin-off is helping CiBER commercialize technology with nano-polymeric paper security features.
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Steven Henslow
Is this technology being integrated into SFU's systems. SFU was at one time a world leader in monitoring heating systems. I could phone the person in charge and address a problem. He could call up all the records for extended periods and fix it. The most critical problem was that it did not sense deviations and automatically report them. That could have saved SFU thousands of dollars of water damage: if water pressures, or temperature changes, or equipment malfunctions could be automatically detected.
We were among the first institutions in the world to have the automatic system monitors for all the smoke alarms on campus. The system does a check of every dector in sequence. If all critical valves, pumps, and thermostats could be monitored then we could also likely know where all the windows have been left open. It costs an unbelievable amount to heat all the spaces that have windows left open overnight.