Instruments-Controls-Electronics : Innovation + Job News

Housed in an historic Portsmouth shoe factory dating back to 1890, Yost Engineering is doing cutting-edge work on sensors to provide a solution to movement and orientation challenges.
 
The company’s new YEI 3-Space Sensor took three years to complete. “It’s an inertial sensor,” explains Francesca Hartop, ceo. “This means it can be attached to a person or object to provide precise information on that person’s or object’s motion and acceleration, as well as any impact experienced.”

Hartop notes that, while some highly accurate sensors exist, they’re very expensive. And, she points out, affordable versions are not very accurate.  “We wanted to combine high accuracy with low cost to provide the benefits of inertial sensors to a broader range of products and industries. Usually, you have to balance cost versus quality. With our YEI 3-Space Sensor, however, there’s no longer that trade off.”

The sensor has several applications. “Because it measures the motion and acceleration of objects, it’s used to control the navigation of autonomous vehicles, robots or marine vehicles,” she explains. The device is also used in sports analysis to study how the movement of an athlete or equipment affects performance.

Yost is also working with partners in physical medicine and rehabilitation and related patient support services that would like to use the sensors for applications such as tremor analysis in Parkinson’s patients and monitoring joint angles in recovering knee-replacement patients.
 
In addition, the YEI 3-Space Sensor is currently being tested by the Department of Defense (DOD) in several situations in which navigation needs can’t be feasibly or consistently accomplished by GPS, Hartop explains. “This includes tracking people and objects, as well as aiding in automated mapping, a technique in which a person or robot quickly runs through an area and the sensor data provides a full map without anyone having to draw or measure it out.” It’s anticipated that the DOD testing will be completed this year.
 
The company, which has received Third Frontier funding, has 28 staff members.
 

Source:  Francesca Hartop, Yost Engineering
Writer:  Lynne Meyer
 

Look out, Silicon Valley! One day Lorain County could be the MEMS capitol of the world, thanks to the new SMART Commercialization Center for Microsystems on the campus of Lorain County Community College (LCCC).

MEMS (microelectromechanical systems) employ mechanical and electrical properties that can measure or actuate a response that is easily managed by conventional electronics.

The Richard Desich SMART center -- named for the Lorain native, serial entrepreneur and philanthropist -- is a multi-user, shared-source facility for commercializing sensor products, including packaging, reliability testing and inspection of Microsystems and sensors.

Scheduled to open in January of 2013, the center will offer business opportunities and job creation in high-growth industries, as well as training for LCCC students. Worldwide, MEMS constitutes a $100-billion industry. Sensors and the Microsystems incorporating them enable technology in the biomedical, alternative energy, manufacturing, aerospace and defense industries.

The center is the result of economic development initiatives and partnerships, including GLIDE, which was created by the Lorain County Commissioners, Lorain County Chamber and LCCC, and the Innovation Fund. Last fall the college received a $5.5 million Ohio Third Frontier grant through Cleveland State University’s Wright Center for Sensor Systems Engineering.

“The college [LCCC] created something called GLIDE, the Great Lakes Innovation and Development Enterprise, which is a suite of services for small businesses and startups . . . In the high-tech sector you often get people with great ideas who lack the business savvy to wrap the correct structure around those ideas,” says Daniel Ereditario; operations coordinator for the SMART  Center.  

The three-story, 46,000-square-foot facility will offer class 100, class 1,000 and class 10,000 clean rooms, general lab space and customer incubation areas. It will be connected to LCCC’s Entrepreneurship Innovation Center.

So far, fifteen companies have plans to utilize the center.

Source: Daniel Ereditario; Operations Coordinator
Writer: Patrick G. Mahoney       

An economic development collaboration in northeast Ohio hopes that more than $2 million in federal grants will help it create more than 600 jobs in northeast Ohio during the next four years.

NorTech, along with Lorain County Community College, JumpStart and MAGNET will work together as one of 20 high growth industry clusters selected by the Obama administration’s Jobs and Innovation Accelerator Challenge.

The Ohio collaboration is intended to accelerate the speed to market for near-production or pilot-production prototypes in the advanced energy and flexible electronics industries. Flexible electronics includes functional films and inks, liquid crystal devices and displays, printed batteries and sensors, OLED lighting and organic photovoltaics.

Rebecca Bagley, President and CEO of NorTech – a regional nonprofit technology-based economic development organization that serves 21 counties in northeast Ohio – says the project will benefit not only her region, but the nation.

“Our national economy is made up of the interconnection of regions across the country,” she says. “This really helps accelerate some important industry areas in northeast Ohio, which then ultimately accelerates growth of the nation.”

The number of northeast Ohio companies in the cluster are growing, with 46 organizations counted within advanced energy and 28 in flexible electronics, says Karen Allport, NorTech’s VP of strategic outreach.

“This represents members of the cluster – that is, companies with which NorTech has a close relationship and are actively engaged in building the clusters in Northeast Ohio. There are many more organizations in these industries but we do not define them as members of the cluster, yet. Our job is to attract them to become a member of the cluster.”

The Ohio partnership, which was selected from among 125 applicants nationally, expects to add 630 jobs, more than $40 million in annual payroll and $38 million in capital attracted during the next four years, Allport says.

Funding to support the Ohio initiative comes from the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Economic Development Administration, the Department of Labor’s Employment and Training Administration and the Small Business Administration.

Sources: Rebecca Bagley and Karen Allport, NorTech
Writer: Gene Monteith

What's really going on with that knee that's giving you trouble? A new device from JointVue, with headquarters in the TechColumbus incubator, may soon give your orthopedic surgeon the ability to see and hear the problem.

JointVue Vision-D Plus, a medical device that combines 3-D ultrasound and Joint Sound (vibration analysis) allows analysis of joint abnormalities through the use of vision and sound -- in real time. The company says a major benefit of the technology will be the capture of 3-D dynamic joint motion, without exposure of the patient to radiation. In addition to competing against X-ray, 3-D computed tomography (CT), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and fluoroscopy, JointVue is maintaining 3-D anatomic joint databases expected to be of interest to orthopedic companies.

JointVue Vision-D is one of four tools under development to make treatment of joint abnormalities simpler and more precise. Joint Guide, will allow scanning of the joint to allow more precise placement of injectables.

The venture is lead locally by Chief Medical Officer Ray Wasielewski, M.D., a board-certified orthopedic surgeon who specializes in minimally invasive hip and knee replacement.

"These new technologies will allow us to move treatment of joint abnormalities into the offices of medical practitioners and away from the offices of specialists and hospitals, says Wasielewski, "and that will reduce costs."

Clinical trials of parts of the system are currently under way at Grant Hospital in Columbus, Hackensack University Medical Center in New Jersey and Vanderbilt University in Tennessee.

Sources: Ray Wasielewski, JointVue; company and industry websites
Writer: Dana Griffith

Eyes in the sky. That's what Persistent Surveillance Systems  of Xenia provides companies and organizations.

PSS has six pilots and three Cessna aircraft on which its Hawkeye video surveillance camera is mounted and operated.

According to Ross McNutt, president of PSS, they've used their Hawkeye camera system to gather environmental data on the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, provide emergency support for the Iowa National Guard during a flood, help with traffic management and security at NASCAR races and support police in several major cities, including Baltimore and Philadelphia.

Last summer, Persistent Surveillance Systems received a grant of $900,000 from the Ohio Third Frontier initiative to develop wide-area airborne surveillance technology for continuous second-by-second video monitoring of city-size areas for law enforcement and security purposes.

What PSS developed is the Hawkeye II camera system.

"Hawkeye II is a colorized higher-resolution camera with 192 million pixels," McNutt explains. "Our original Hawkeye system was 88 million pixels. The Hawkeye II camera is comparable to 600 simultaneous video cameras. It enables us to watch a five-mile by five-mile area of a major city." 

The live video is downlinked in real time to PSS analysts at the command center.

"When we're working with police departments, police officers are also in our command center and in constant contact with police dispatchers who give them information about crimes in progress, "McNutt says. PSS has assisted law enforcement organizations throughout the United States with more than 30 murder investigations since 2007.

PSS started in 2007 with four employees and now has 25.

"We're partnering with Clark State Community College and the Advanced Technical Intelligence Center for Human Systems Development to train more analysts," he says. They have 45 analysts in training and plan on hiring many of them to work on the new Hawkeye II system.

"We're very appreciative of the support of the Third Frontier program," McNutt states. "It's allowing us to grow at a much faster rate."

Source: Ross McNutt, Persistent Surveillance System
Writer: Lynne Meyer

Lorain County Community College in Elyria is helping cement Ohio's reputation as the home of sensor technology innovation.

The school recently established the SMART (Sensor/Microsystems Advanced packaging and Reliability Testing) Center to help device developers accomplish critical tasks they usually have performed out of state: advanced packaging, reliability testing and advanced life simulation. It received a $5.5 million grant from the Wright Center for Sensor Systems Engineering at Cleveland State University for equipment and technical support for the center.

Four entities are SMART Center partners already: Acense LLC in Twinsburg, which is developing a sensor focused on early fault warning for oil-immersed electrical equipment; R.W. Beckett Corp. in North Ridgeville, which makes commercial and residential oil and gas burners; GreenField Solar in Oberlin, maker of scalable solar power products capable of simultaneously generating electric power and heat; and Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland.

Jack W. Harley, founder and president of Acense, says he is enthusiastic about the SMART Center and sees it "being very valuable to us." The center currently is testing packaging concepts for an Acense sensor; later it will test that sensor's long-term characteristics. Harley says that sensor is part of what will be a whole line of products and he expects to use the center for each one.

Harley's not the only executive predicting long-term benefits of the center.

"The SMART Center offers companies affordable access to important services," Kevin Beckett, president of R.W. Beckett Corp., says. Plus, "it raises the visibility of sensor technology overall, which is likely to spark innovation in Northeastern Ohio."

Beckett calls the SMART Center "a huge, huge plus for the area."

Sources: Tracy Green, Lorain County Community College; Kevin Beckett, R. W. Beckett Corp.; Jack W. Harley, Acense
Writer: Gabriella Jacobs

I2C Technologies of North Canton has leveraged the power of new-generation internet protocol cameras to build a growing business among government and industry customers who need to closely monitor their assets.

Unlike analog cameras, which have been around since the advent of the television, IP cameras house their own microprocessors and interface with a network. Video can be stored within the unit itself for either real-time or future retrieval -- while at the same time transmitting live video to the customer from remote locations.

Jeff Doak, I2C's CEO, says he and partner Bryon Taylor, a former Perry Township detective, built the business around proprietary video management software that allows a user to program camera systems to focus on prioritized events -- like a car driving into a restricted area -- when activity is triggered by a sensor.

Some 160 customers in Ohio and surrounding states have called on I2C to install remote surveillance systems and integrate the software. But Doak says the business is poised to grow with a new line launched a year and a half ago -- a portable, self-contained four-camera unit that can monitor in detail an area the size of a football field.

"The solution we came up with uses a combination of three high-definition fixed cameras and one high-definition pan-tilt-zoom (PTZ) camera," Doak says. The PTZ camera moves and uses optics to avoid the pixilation that occurs with digital zoom cameras, he says.

I2C manufactures the housing in two flavors -- one a normal unit that can be placed on a pole, building or other location -- the other disguised as a transformer box.

The company has benefited from investments by North Coast Angel Fund and Ohio TechAngels, and Doak says "there's a pretty heavy capacity for growth."

Source: Jeff Doak, I2C
Writer: Gene Monteith

The world's largest infrared camera may soon be helping to keep America safe.

That's just one of the latest products sprouting from a collaboration between the University of Dayton's IDCAST and its partners in business, government and academia.

Two-year-old IDCAST � short for the Institute for the Development and Commercialization of Advanced Sensor Technology � accelerates the development and commercialization of camera and sensor technologies for private and government entities. In partnership with the UD Research Institute, the Air Force Research Laboratory Sensors Directorate, and other university, government and military entities -- IDCAST has fast become an organization that matters.

Initially made possible by $28-million in state grants, "we've created more than 250 jobs, 36 in academia and 215 in industry," says Larrell Walters, the center's executive director.

That brings us back to the world's largest infrared camera.

L-3 Cincinnati Electronics, a division of L-3 Communications Corp., is developing the camera with the help of a $4.2-million grant made through IDCAST. It's only the latest in sophisticated imaging devices the company has built for the surveillance needs of private and government clients.

Dubbed "Night Stare," the camera boasts a 25 megapixel resolution (that's 25 million pixels), but by panning its target in a four-step pattern can supply an image reaching 100 megapixels, says John Devitt, the company's engineering manager.

What does that mean? The next biggest infrared camera provides just over 300,000 pixels � about the resolution of a traditional TV screen. Devitt "we should make delivery of a prototype this year."

Sources: Larrell Walters, John Divett
Writer: Gene Monteith