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 Photos: Uniquest |
Two companies recently spun-out from The University of Queensland (UQ) are developing ground-breaking technologies based on sound detection that will provide a competitive edge and enhance patient-health monitoring in the future.
UQ’s main commercialisation arm, UniQuest, has played a key role in assisting both projects (or technologies) to protect their intellectual property, while also helping them develop their commercial strategies. The plans will help attract investment and enable the innovations to successfully enter the global marketplace.
Corpison™, the brainchild of Professor Penelope Sanderson and Associate Professor Marcus Watson (pictured), is developing a suite of continuous audible displays for patient monitoring applications.
The technology, based on a technique known as sonification, is targeted at improving the quality of care and potentially saving lives in critical care environments, such as operating theatres and ambulances.
Studies have shown that anaesthetists only allocate a small amount of time to inspect visual displays and sometimes minutes can elapse between each scan of the visual displays.
The Corpison™ technology presents the patient’s vital signs data continuously through specially designed sound patterns that are unobtrusive when all is normal and steady, but that attract attention when there are changes.
The technology allows practitioners to immediately recognize trends and even quite subtle changes in the patient’s condition. Practitioners are able to focus on the task at hand – patient care – in the knowledge that all is normal. If anything changes they know they will hear it well before their next scan of the visual displays.
Ausonex™, a finalist in UQ Business School’s 2006 Enterprize competition, has developed a hearing test that saves time and money and helps reduce anxiety.
In Australia, the USA and increasingly in other countries around the world, neonatal hearing screening tests are becoming mandatory since early intervention can improve outcomes. The test regimes are costly to administer and have high false-positive rates, leading to many babies being unnecessarily re-tested.
This adds further cost to public health systems and is extremely stressful for the parents of babies who have been wrongly identified as potentially having hearing problems.
The Ausonex™ system could halve the testing time and significantly reduce the false positive rates, both huge benefits to health care systems, patients and parents of neonates.
The technology has been trialled at the Mater Mothers’ Hospital in Brisbane and with appropriate funding a pre-production prototype is expected to be ready for extensive field trials later this year.
With a large US market for patient monitoring devices and the rapid global expansion of mandatory neonatal hearing tests, managing director of UniQuest, David Henderson said the formation of Corpison™ and Ausonex™ were fantastic achievements for the university. "They demonstrate the innovation, drive and ambition of people in the Smart State," he said.
Last reviewed 3 April 2007