INNOVATION AWARDS

The Wall Street Journal 2009 Technology Innovation Awards

This year's winners include: a tool to identify new disease strains, an artificial hand, a solar-powered base station for mobile phones and paper-thin flexible speakers ...

By MICHAEL TOTTY

M edical detective work may have just gotten a lot easier.

Just how difficult it is gets highlighted every time an infectious disease sweeps the globe, as the new strain of swine flu did earlier this year. Current methods of testing for disease-causing microbes are pretty effective at discovering whether an infected fluid or tissue sample contains a known virus or bacteria. But trying to detect previously unknown organisms is a whole different story.

To address this problem, David Ecker, co-founder of Ibis Biosciences Inc., and a team of researchers developed a sensor able to quickly detect and identify all the pathogens in a given sample.

The equipment promises not only to alert health officials to new disease strains, but also to guard against bioterrorism and enable hospitals to identify antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

Abbott Laboratories and its Ibis Biosciences unit, which developed the Ibis T5000 sensor, took the Gold in this year's Wall Street Journal Technology Innovation Awards.

The Silver award went to Touch Bionics Inc. for its i-Limb artificial hand, which features bendable fingers and a rotating thumb. The hand uses sophisticated motors and computer controls to grip objects and move in ways that traditional prosthetic hands can't.

Vihaan Networks Ltd., an Indian telecommunications company known as VNL, won the Bronze award for a solar-powered base station to bring cellphone access to remote rural villages. The inexpensive base station can be quickly assembled and set up by unskilled villagers, and can run entirely on the built-in solar panels and batteries.

For the ninth annual Innovation Awards, a Journal editor reviewed nearly 500 entries, sending more than 180 to a team of judges from research institutions, venture-capital firms and other companies. Judges considered whether innovations were truly groundbreaking and new this year looked at whether their application would be particularly useful in a time of economic hardship.

And the winners in each category are…

Consumer Electronics

Taiwan's Industrial Technology Research Institute, or ITRI, won in the consumer-electronics category for its work developing a paper-thin, flexible speaker.

Researchers at ITRI, a nonprofit organization, devised a way to create arrays of tiny speakers that can be combined to produce high-fidelity speaker systems of almost any size.

Because the fleXpeaker is lightweight and consumes little power, it could be attractive for use in cellphones or in car sound systems. Other possible applications include giant banners that could be used to deliver public-service announcements in train stations or advertising messages in shopping malls.

ITRI is seeking to license the technology or create a spinoff company to commercialize the product.

壁紙也能播音樂 超薄紙喇叭獲創新獎

‧聯合新聞網 2009/09/15

你可能看過電子紙、但應該沒看過薄如紙片的喇叭，工研院研發的「超薄音響喇叭」，未來可跟壁紙結合，成為家中裝潢的一部分，未來你家牆壁就可以傳出音樂；這項發明已獲得華爾街日報「全球科技創新獎」消費性電子類首獎。

紙喇叭的變身。 圖／工研院、聯合報系資料照片 你可能看過電子紙、但應該沒看過薄如紙片的喇叭，工研院研發的「超薄音響喇叭」（paper-thin flexible speaker），未來可跟壁紙結合，成為家中裝潢的一部分，未來你家牆壁就可以傳出音樂；這項發明已獲得華爾街日報「全球科技創新獎」消費性電子類首 獎。 超薄音響喇叭其實可稱做「紙音響」，可以用紙或塑膠薄片生產，成品只有零點一公分厚度，其薄如紙，彎曲自如，不佔空間，未來可應用在攜帶式3C產品，或像壁紙一樣貼在牆上，工研院已申請十七案、四十六件全球專利。 華爾街日報昨天向全球公佈「二○○九年全球科技創新獎」得獎名單，工研院的紙音響從全球五百多個世界一流競爭者中脫穎而出，打敗惠普、摩托羅拉、等國際知名企業。 工研院電子與光電所長詹益仁說，「超薄音響喇叭」是經濟部技術處科技專案，用「印」的就能生產，是音響界的大革命。 他說，技術的關鍵是一層特殊設計的絕緣膜，上下包覆著帶電極的紙（或塑膠片），只要把訊號輸進去，就能產生振動、發出聲音，發聲效果不輸傳統喇叭，且耗電量只需傳統喇叭的十分之一。 華爾街日報從二○○一年開始舉辦全球科技創新獎，每年參與者眾，得獎機率只有百分之七。工研院指出，今年有十六位來自各國的評審團，包括知名研究機構、創投公司及知名企業專家學者，不僅注重技術創新，也重視未來應用面與商機。