GE announces $ 2 m for developing wearable RFID sensors
Bangalore | Wednesday, Nov 18 2009 IST
 

GE Global Research, the technology development arm of the General Electric Company, today announced two million dollar award for the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) to develop wearable Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) sensors to alert people to the presence of chemical agents in the air and sample exhaled breath to serve as an early indicator of disease.

According to a release here today, RFID sensors are commonly used to track a wide variety of items, ranging from products in a supply chain to baggage at an airport. GE's sensors are unique as they combine RFID tracking with an acute gas sensing capability, which can detect the presence of potentially harmful chemical agents in the air. And as these sensors could be made at a size smaller than a penny, they could also be part of a typical identification badge and serve as an early warning for people about the presence of chemical agents in the air. GE Global Research Principal Scientist Radislav Potyrailo, who is leading the wearable RFID sensor project, said ''we are creating a dynamic sensing platform that will provide real-time information to people about the presence of potentially harmful chemical agents in the air.'' ''GEs sensing platform could be readily adapted to many other interesting applications. For example, it could be used to analyse a persons breath. Simply breathing on the sensor could potentially pick up biomarkers that serve as an early signal to the presence of certain diseases such as diabetes or cancer and metabolic disorders.'' This NIEHS-funded project has been built on several years of chemical, gas and bio-sensing research Potyrailo. The demand for new sensors to detect volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and chemical agents in air is driven by the need for self-contained, simple approaches for simultaneous, highly selective measurements of multiple vapours. The sensor system, being developed as part of the NIEHS project, would employ a novel sensing approach that utilises resonant antenna structures of RFID sensors that are coated with various sensing films, the release added.

-- (UNI) -- 18MS13.xml

 

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