FedEx Institute's Office of Technology Transfer Awards Technology Development Grants

August 18, 2016 - The Office of Technology Transfer of the FedEx Institute of Technology recently awarded Technology Development Grants to five researchers across the University. These grants, awarded for the 2016-2017 academic year, are to promote faculty innovations plus support the protection and commercialization of inventions made by faculty and researchers.

In order to encourage and enable the development of the most commercially promising technologies, the Institute awarded five competitive grants of $20,000 each in a one-time allocation to help drive their inventions closer to commercial development and licensing. These grants were awarded to the following recipients/projects and have clearly identified the next steps or milestones in moving their projects forward:

Dr. Bashir Morshed – "Fully-passive Wireless Continuous Temperature Sensing System Using Low-cost Inkjet Printed Disposable Body-worn Sensors." Prototypes will be developed on flexible substrates of paper as low-cost, body-worn, disposable electronic patches. The scanner device will be prototyped using an embedded design process. Another aspect of the project is to develop an Android app for interfacing the scanner device and show the temperature;

Dr. Dipankar Dasgupta – "The Development of an Adaptive Multi-factor Authentication Framework." The goal is to develop this Adaptive-MFA for use in mobile devices to develop the client application to support mobile devices in most widely used Android platform, and to improve the performance of the surrounding condition sensors for desktop environment;

Dr. Firouzeh Sabri – "Lightweight Flexible Temperature Sensor Kit for Biologics." The next steps involve finalizing the design of the hand-held detector and the optics that must be integrated into the unit, connect and test the detector to the app of a smart phone, test it under various environmental conditions, and identify kit options so that potential clients can chose custom-specific kit components;

Dr. Joel Bumgardner – "Chitosan Nanofiber Composition, Composition Comprising Modified Chitosan, and Method of Use" to demonstrate the compatibility of the membranes with bone grafts. The next milestones then are to evaluate the chitosan membranes with a synthetic bone graft in a rodent model and move to large (pig or canine) pre-clinical models; and

Dr. Susan Elswick – "ENGAGE: An API Capable Data Collection and Analysis System for Education and Behavioral Health." Key objectives for Phase I research include the need to make the ENGAGE system API and IoT compatible. Once the ENGAGE system is equipped to manage API and IoTs, then work can begin on a specific IoT tools that are efficient in data collection, practical for the classroom setting and cost effective.

As part of the award, recipients are required to submit a final report detailing all progress and accomplishments, which are funded by or related to this grant. Final reports are to be submitted by the end of June 2017.

FOR MORE INFORMATION
Mary Ann Dawson
901.678.1592
mdawson@memphis.edu