DCU NCSR create links with IPRI in Australia
Monday 24 September 2007

Prof Malcolm Smyth, Principal Investigator, NCSR, and Dean for the Faculty of Science and Health, and Prof Gordon Wallace, Director of the Intelligent Polymer Research Institute (IPRI), Australia

Imagine a blood pressure sensor, a thermometer, or even a pregnancy test that you could ‘build’ using the same home printer and paper that you use to print your holiday photographs? The National Centre for Sensor Research (NCSR) at Dublin City University is rising to this challenge. They are using components supplied from the Intelligent Polymer Research Institute (IPRI) in Australia to transform expensive sensor technologies into ‘easy to fabricate’, ‘low-cost’, ‘printable’ biomedical devices. The Institute from Down Under supplies the NCSR with polymeric nanomaterials that extraordinarily can conduct electricity and can be manipulated to electrically detect changes in temperature, pH or can even be modified with biological components to target hormones, metabolites or cardiac markers.

Because of the ‘nano’-dimension of these particles (100,000 times smaller than a human hair), these conducting polymers can be easily deposited onto flexible surfaces such as paper, using inkjet printing technology. The NCSR has this year received almost 0.5 million Euro funding from Enterprise Ireland to develop this technology specifically. The concept has already been proven, the polymer has been used to print electrically-conducting Irish leprechaun and Australian kangaroos. The images can also change colour depending of the pH of the environment. In the future, you will perhaps be able to choose if it’s a leprechaun, kangaroo or even an image of your doctor that will tell you if you are pregnant or not!

This is just one of the exciting technologies being showcased at a DCU symposium being held next Monday. The NCSR has worked closely with IPRI over the past 20 years and they have had success together at developing the ‘Bender Sensor’, the main attraction of which is that that it requires very little energy and can run for thousands of hours on a small watch battery. ‘Wearable Sensors’ will also feature, where scientists in Australia and Ireland work together on sensors integrated into clothing, that monitor your heartbeat, pulse and breathing. All these technologies have shared patent agreements on them between DCU and IPRI, based on an intellectual property contract to be formally signed on Monday afternoon, a contract which will hopefully ensure continuing, fruitful science and research for the next 20 years.