Hosted by IPI Singapore, it is also an anchor event of the inaugural Singapore Week of Innovation and TeCHnology (SWITCH). This year saw over 2,000 delegates from over 30 countries, a 10% increase from last year’s event. IPI expects to facilitate more than 300 business meetings between delegates, exhibitors and speakers over two days of engaging and intensive crowdsourcing and crowd-pitching sessions.
“TechInnovation provides a platform for small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) to gain exposure to our global network of technology providers and raises their industry profile. IPI’s personalised business matching also enables these enterprises to explore collaborations with potential partners. Through TechInnovation, the SMEs can take on innovation projects to expand their businesses,” said Professor Lam Khin Yong, Executive Director of IPI.
One such business matching success is local nutrition SME, Health Food Matters, which signed a licensing agreement to produce and market a range of ready-to-eat texture-modified meals using the technology developed by Changi General Hospital (CGH). The technology modifies the food texture and fluid consistency to make swallowing safe for patients and elderly with swallowing difficulties. They were introduced to each other at last year’s TechInnovation by the National Healthcare Innovation Centre (NHIC). The license agreement marks an unique partnership between a public healthcare institution and a SME to further food technology.
More than 300 ready-to-market and emerging technologies were demonstrated by over 120 exhibitors from 17 countries across the themes – advanced manufacturing & engineering, urban solutions & sustainability, health & personal care and services & digital economy. Some of the technology showcased include:
· Advanced manufacturing & engineering
The Robotic Chef is a cooking system designed to be a cost-effective solution to help enterprises in the F&B sector to increase productivity and improve the consistency of food production. Presented by local SME Kurve Automation, the Robotic Chef is programmable to handle different cuisines, and is suitable for use in food automation in food manufacturing factories or centralised kitchens. Fried rice was demonstrated on the showfloor on the first day.
· Urban solutions & sustainability
Printable thin film solar cells by NEW CREATE is a solution-based method of manufacturing solar cells for applications such as building facades, rooftop power generation and solar farms. It is cost-effective, easily scalable for large area production and can be fabricated on flexible substrates.
· Health & personal care
Ngee Ann Polytechnic exhibited novel cosmetics products incorporating mushroom extracts. The cosmetic products combine the nutritional and medicinal values of the mushrooms. The technology prepares the mushroom extracts and formulates the mushroom-based cosmetic products which contain high levels of anti-ageing and skin-lightening compounds.
· Services & digital economy
When it comes to driving, free space is defined as the area in front of a vehicle that has no objects that might obstruct its movement. The Panasonic R&D Centre Singapore presented its Free Space Technology for Automotive and Robotics, a method to achieve robust free-space estimation for safe and efficient navigation of vehicles as well as robots.
Other stories from the TechInnovation showfloor included:
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ProtoKing creates industrial design. The items on display included razors, pens, faucets, and airline crockery. The metals that the company can work with include alloys, titanium, silver and gold, among others. Other items on display were made of silicon and various plastics. |
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| Roceso Technologies, which makes soft robotic devices, displayed the EsoGlove, a robotic glove whose movements can be controlled by an app, or by another glove. Demonstrators at the booth talked about helping stroke patients use their functioning hand to exercise the fingers of their non-functioning hand as a use case, but the glove could easily be used to remotely manipulate items in any environment by someone with little training. The control unit for the glove fits into a light, portable pouch (background), allowing a user some mobility. |
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| Anewtech Systems has a digital signage solution, Intelli-Signage, that includes hardware as well as signage software and data analytics. The solution provides useful feedback in real time about advertising on digital displays, such as the age and gender of users, as well as how many times an advertisement was selected for playback. Data displayed in an advertisement is also customisable. Anewtech Systems allows users to change selected data on the app, so they might update the price of gold for the day, for instance. |
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| Gesture-controlled wearable platform from the Centre of Innovation Electronics & IOT, part of Nanyang Polytechnic, that can be customised as required for a smart home, turning on the lights for example, or remotely monitoring if daily exercises have been completed. The wearable begins capturing gestures made once it is within a specific 'activity zone', and gestures such as tracing the outline of a rectangle are supported. The Centre is open to working with small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) in Singapore on projects that can make use of existing technology that it has developed, or it can look for solutions to completely new problems. |
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| The Centre of Innovation Electronics & IOT also displayed a visual analytics platform which could be used to show footfall statistics at various displays. |
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| CLOPTech provides solutions for Gigabit wireless connectivity, envisaged to replace cabling between access points. The technology makes use of the unlicensed 60 GHz radio frequency band. Laying new cable trunking can be very expensive, a booth representative explained. In the demonstration four cameras are streaming video smoothly to the screen in a crowded exhibition area. A normal Wi-Fi device would not be able to handle this as the amount of bandwidth available to it would be much lower in general, and even lower when many devices are all requesting bandwidth. Use cases could include providing Wi-Fi in outdoor areas. |
| Nanyang Technological University-NTUitive
(NTUitive)
is the university’s innovation and enterprise company, supporting its
mission to develop an ecosystem to
encourage innovation, foster entrepreneurship and facilitate the
commercialisation of research. The Ntuitive pin insertion demo shows how
an off-the-shelf robot can move pins from one point to another on a
cork board, while another demo of the robot on video showcases how it
can be used to control a drill. Vision and touch capabilities, motion
planning and robot control software could be brought together in a
solution handling delicate components that is more adaptable than the
typical manufacturing applications for robotics, which are for fast,
repetitive movements in relatively inflexible environments. The company
hopes to source a strong use case for the prototype, developing a
software framework that can be commercialised thereafter. |
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| NTUitive has also developed games for the Kinect that allow more interactivity. They are especially popular with the elderly, who have been less exposed to gesture controlled technologies. A booth representative shared that some of the games have been installed at community centres, and there are queues to play them. |
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| Elixir Technology's Elixir Business Analytics Platform, available on-premise or through the cloud, offers a comprehensive suite of capabilities for just about any use case, from visualisation to a dashboard, data mining, reporting, big data analytics, task scheduling and data management. Pictured is a real-time monitoring solution for the elderly which can show their whereabouts at home and alert others if they fall. |
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| The Restroom Visitlizer System from Convergent Smart Technologies creates smart toilets which can figure out how many people have visited them and alert cleaning staff when they require cleaning. An infrared sensor (background, left) counts visitors, while a smell sensor (background, right) can sound the alarm when odour levels cross a specific threshold. Besides ammonia, the sensor can also detect methyl mercaptan, hydrogen sulphide and trimethyamine, with one sensor covering up to 16 sq m. The switch in the foreground completes the loop by indicating that a cleaner has arrived at the toilet. Communicating via 3G, Wi-Fi or a fixed network, the system is positioned as 'zero maintenance' and will also provide feedback on toilet usage patterns. The company already has a number of clients, including hotels such as The Fullerton Hotel and the Marina Bay Sands, real estate companies like Frasers Centrepoint Malls, CapitaLand and Far East Organization, and tourist spots such as Wildlife Reserves Singapore. A booth representative said that the system has made cleaning staff more productive. Instead of following fixed schedules with no visibility of whether a toilet needs cleaning at all, staff will go to a toilet when it actually needs cleaning, as many times as required. |
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| Glass is more than window dressing these days. ClearVue Technologies, an Australian company, has created nanotechnology that turns transparent glass into a solar concentrator. When combined with a solar photovoltaic cell, electricity is generated. A sample 50cm x 50cm pane of glass fitted with three solar cell subsystems allows 70% of light through and produces more than 9W of electrivity in non-peak weather conditions in Australia. ClearVue estimates that the materials will last more than 20 years. Use cases include grid-independent bus stops or greenhouses, lower fuel consumption for vehicles, less need for the grid to be built out to remote or rural areas, and the ability to rely on renewable energy. |
TechInnovation also saw the introduction of a new segment on Singapore-Europe partnership Opportunities. The Enterprise Europe Network (EEN) is the world’s largest business and innovation support network. Singapore enterprises will be able to expand their reach and connect to the EEN partners from the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Hungary and Spain.
Hashtag: #TechInnovation2016
posted from Bloggeroid
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