Sensors | Office of Technology Licensing

Available Technologies by Category
Wearable Health Monitoring Device Improves Data Quality and Accuracy	High performance: Captures real-time, real-world data of multiple physiological signals with a significant reduction in MA interference Chest-mounted: Provides more accurate ECG, heart rate, respiratory rate, and activity detection than existing wrist-worn commercial monitors Comfortable: Adheres securely and discretely to the skin using a breathable soft membrane for continuous conformal contact, eliminating excessive sweating and skin irritation	8691
Handheld Breath Collection Device for Detecting Disease Biomarkers	Improved diagnosis: Analyzes both the gas and liquid sampled from the patient’s breath for potentially more robust and multifaceted results Enhanced patient experience: Requires a shorter exhalation cycle to get a breath sample, making the test more comfortable for patients Small and portable: Optimizes and miniaturizes the collection process for easy point-of-care applications	8791
A Chip-Scale Linear Ion Trap to Enable Portable Mass Spectrometers	Enabling: Can be used in the development of much smaller mass spectrometers than are currently available—from benchtop devices to handheld or even smaller instruments—which would extend their use to applications in which they are not currently cost effective High-performance: Provides better than unit-mass resolution and high detection efficiency, and operates at much higher pressures than larger mass analyzers, as shown during lab-based simulations Multi-modal: Allows for several different modes of operation and enables tandem(MS/MS or MS2) or multi-stage/sequential (MSn) mass spectrometry, greatly improving capability compared with other analyzers	8137
Increasing Medium-Chain Fatty Acid (MCFA) Yield in Bacterial Host with Engineered Enzyme	High performance: Increases the yield of MCFAs during chemical and biopolymer synthesis Enabling: Improves the microbial production of chemicals that require the expression of heterologous enzymes Adaptable: Potentially applies to methods of engineering other heterologous enzymes to interact with endogenous proteins in order to produce molecules of interest in a bacterial host	7595
A Biomimetic Nose with Machine Learning for Advanced Threat Detection	Enhanced chemical detection: Reduces proximity issues and enhances detection Functional in air and liquid mediums: Can detect single or multiple chemical agents even when the medium contains both a liquid and a gas. An attachment makes it possible to use the device in liquid with air monitoring sensors. Continuous improvement: Uses machine learning algorithms to continually improve agent characterization	7796
AwareSite Proximity Safety Sensing System for Construction and Other Work Sites	Improved work safety and efficiency: Not only are accidents prevented when workers and equipment operators are alerted that they are crossing set safety boundaries, their proximity and movement data are also stored in the cloud and can be used to analyze work patterns that could improve safety, work process efficiency, and more. Low-cost and flexible hardware: The system uses inexpensive custom PPU devices but can also be paired with workers’ personal smartphones for connecting to the system. User friendly and reliable: System setup and operation is simple. Beacons use Bluetooth® low-energy technology and can last more than one year without changing batteries.	7970, 7971
Advance Warning System for Improved Safety in Roadway Work Zones	Enhanced safety: Rather than relying on impact-activated devices, the system issues real-time warnings as soon as the perimeter is breached, providing more time for workers to react and get to safety. Portable and changeable: The system can be easily moved or adjusted to accommodate changes to the work zone during the day. Smart analytics: Analysis of intrusion data helps pinpoint areas within the work zone that are more susceptible to breaches, enabling more effective and efficient security.	7397
Skin-Conformal Wearable Stress Monitor Delivers Greater Precision and Continuous, Wireless Monitoring with Comfort and Flexibility	All-in-one: The personal adhesive bandage-like single device platform offers wireless, multi-data sensing by simply mounting it on the skin. Disposable: This wearable device is fully disposable after the use and the measured data can be simply sent to the cloud via a tablet or smartphone app. Compact: The unique, thin design of this bioelectric device is one-sixth the volume of current market offerings—weighing less than 7 g, including its rechargeable battery.	8414
Smart Webcam Shield Protects Users from Unknown External Digital Intrusion	Secure: Offers visual obstruction of the webcam even when remote software attempts to record without triggering the computer’s LED indicator Reliable: Automates the webcam safeguard for ongoing protection without reliance on user engagement Flexible: Enables two different actuators via the same sensor	8610
Adaptive Broadband Impedance Matching in Ultrasound Front-End Electronics	High performance: Improves power transfer and acoustic reflectivity Flexible: Enables multimodal and tunable operation of CMUTs Efficient: Provides optimal matching for co-design of CMUT electronics	8342
Purely Passive Radio-Frequency Identification	Powerful: Projected to support energy harvesting sensors at distances over 100 meters from readers and/or radio transmission sources Efficient: Enables conversion of RF energy at higher efficiency and at higher output voltages than current electronic energy harvesting methods Widely applicable: May advance RFID applications in a wide range of fields including computing, sensing, and communication	7194
IMUTube: Converting Videos of Human Activity into Virtual IMU Data Streams	Automated: Automates wearable sensor data collection, which can in turn be used to train HAR models by simply giving them access to large-scale video repositories Accurate: Demonstrated recognition accuracy in some cases comparable to models trained only with non-virtual (“real”) sensor data in benchmark studies Superior: Outperformed models using real sensor data alone by adding only small amounts of real sensor data to the virtual sensor dataset in benchmark studies	8538
Miniaturized Modular-Array Fluorescence Microscopy	Powerful: Offers high fluorescence sensitivity, efficiency, and spatiotemporal resolution (~3 µm and up to 60 Hz) Configurable: Offers compatibility with conventional cell culture assays and physiological imaging, providing accessibility to upright physiological imaging and integration with biochemical sensors under the cell platform Efficient: Provides effective parallelization of multi-site data acquisition	8580
Polarization-Based Method for Mitigating Wireless Signal Interference Both During Transmission and Receipt	Improves mitigation of co-channel interference: Particularly useful for OFDM-based systems, this method improves mitigation of co-channel interference in the frequency domain. By optimizing the SINR as a function of the frequency component, this method provides improved suppression performance relative to single polarization-filter solutions. Maximizes SINR: A set of frequency-dependent MMSE filter weights can be applied to suppress interference, which maximizes the SINR. Flexible: This method can be applied to OFDM, CDMA systems, and various other communication systems having different modulation formats that may or may not require additional processing.	4087
Advancing Mass Spectrometry with Novel Interface	Flexible: Allows for integration with a range of operational modes and analytical workflows for different ESI-MS techniques High performance: Offers enhanced sensitivity and a significantly improved limit of detection Robust and effective: Minimizes charged ion loss and enables sampling of the most analytically “valuable” droplets	4182
Molecular Flux Measurement Device and Method	Efficient: Enables a 3x increase in MBE speed compared with metal organic chemical vapor deposition Controlled: Provides flux stability and control by enabling in-situ measurement of a signal related to the flux, achieving 0.001% flux stability under optimal conditions Reliable: Enables signal measurement in real time, providing high accuracy and reproducibility	3556
Enabling Multi-Beam, High-Capacity Massive MIMO for 5G Communications and More	State-of-the-art: Is the first Rx-array design of its kind, autonomously achieving modulated blocker suppression and desired signal beamforming simultaneously without the need for a digital beamforming aid Robust: Enables multi-beam high-capacity massive MIMO to address the demands of both commercial and defense applications Scalable: Employs ASFs that achieve 4-element spatial filters with sharpened selectivity that can be extended to larger array sizes of thousands of elements and cancellation of any number of interference signals	8120
Enabling Privacy-Preserving Search Over Fuzzy Databases	Privacy-preserving: Improves the security of biometric-based surveillance, identification, or searches for individuals using their biometric data over private databases Timely: Addresses the requirements of recent and emerging privacy protection regulations and policies Practical: Fills a gap in privacy-preserving search technologies, which currently do not accommodate searching of fuzzy data such as biometrics	8506
Virtual Sensing Integrated for Predictive Reliability (VIPR)	Advanced: Acquires system data via virtual sensing, without the need for physical sensors in all desired locations Cost-reducing: Aims to reduce maintenance and planning costs for solid rocket motors and potentially other vehicle propulsion systems Predictive: Provides useful, repeatable, extensive data sets to predict rocket performance and enable proactive plans for propulsion system maintenance, upgrades, and replacements, potentially reducing downtime and failures	8555
Integrating Electrical Sensors into Soft-Lithography Microfluidic Devices	Sophisticated: Advances the integration of electrical sensors on microfluidic devices with a simple, approachable solution Sensitive: Demonstrates a higher signal sensitivity than electrodes in a typical coplanar arrangement Adaptable: Allows for greater layout flexibility because of its straightforward fabrication process	7769

Technologies