So, let's start off by imagining a wearable on your skin. It looks like a bandaid,
but it's integrated with electronics, which are capable of measuring and communicating
your health vitals. This could be your skin temperature, ECG, or your oxygen levels.
It allows you to live your life wire-free, while still offering you the peace of mind
that intervention is possible when those vitals drop to levels of concern.
Now, these devices don't always have to be on your skin. They can actually be in the environment
around you. You may not feel it, and this is what we call a nearable. So you imagine a nearable now,
on a mattress on which you sleep every night, and it's able to pick up your presence, position and
posture in bed. Now this is critical information for residents in aged care homes, to enhance the
quality of the care and to prevent falls, which is the number one concern in these aged care homes.
You don't need to imagine these any more now, the future is actually here right now.
So what I actually described are two of the technologies developed in the lab,
at RMIT University where I work, and these are actually undergoing field trials right now.
So what started as a fundamental research for me, back in 2012, in a lab at RMIT University.
And what I'm going to do is take you through that decade-long journey of commercialisation, of how
we managed to bring this technology out from the lab into real life through collaborations.
Now I'm an electronics engineering professor and innovator, and I do research in what are
called "clean rooms" at RMIT University. I'm not sure how many of you have heard of the word,
"clean rooms," but true to the word they are rooms which are very, very, very clean!
Basically, the air in this is filtered stringently to remove
any form of contamination. We wear bunny suits in these clean rooms and protective equipment,
not because the lab is dangerous, but because we are the biggest contaminant in these labs.
The electronics we make in these labs are micro- and nano-sized,
and so a single eyelash, or oil from your skin, can actually destroy thousands of devices.
And it's in a clean room like this where my vision to create the next generation
of electronics which are thin and flexible was actually realised. Now as a research project,
we had to overcome numerous materials challenges to take smart technology, like your phones or
your tablets, and render them on a platform which is like a contact lens-type material. So take a
breakable and try to make it unbreakable. So think thin, soft, flexible and pliable technologies.
It took us three years to get there, to take brittle layers of fantastic, functional materials
which are usually glass-like in nature, and render them soft and pliable. At the end of that journey,
we were really, really excited and we thought we'd opened up a world of possibilities.
Now what could those do for you - in other words, what can't those do for you! It can sense
environmental dangers - so UV levels, pollutants, dangerous gases. Or you can sense your own health
parameters - your saliva, your sweat, your tears, all of this has vital information about yourself.
So where can we go next? What started after that was an initially very optimistic but slowly
turned into a quite frustrating journey of endless industry meetings and conversations. In my head,
I imagined this technology making its way out into the world as a wearable, which can sense the world
around you and also sense the world within you. But after three years, I met the CEO of Sleeptite.
Now Sleeptite is a company which is actually looking at revolutionising the world of sleep.
Cameron, their CEO, had valuable insights into the world of residential aged care homes,
where currently the monitoring is being done during the course of the night by door-to-door,
hourly checks. So, essentially what that means is, every hour, all through the night,
a person is coming and checking in on the resident in the aged care home. Now this will disrupt
their sleep all through the night, it's the most inefficient way to use a carer's time and energy,
and it does not allow them to offer care where it's most needed in the course of the night.
Now Cam wanted to know if he could take our clean room-developed micro- and nano-tech,
and actually translate them into mattress-sized, warehouse-manufactured tech for better health,
and for better sleep, and for better care. One thing my numerous conversations in those
past three years has taught me is I need to be flexible, just like my technology in some ways.
I was keen that this technology goes in the way of market pull and market need.
What followed after that was, again, a fascinating journey of commercialisation and collaboration,
not just between research and industry, but also the manufacturing partner Sleepeezee.
We created our nearable technology REMI, which I described earlier,
and this was actually launched last year. It was again a three-year journey, I have something to
do with the number three I think, most of my journeys are three years! But this journey
required us to innovate very, very differently. We had to start all over from the beginning because
there's a different set of priorities. Now in the world of commercialisation, what matters is cost,
reliability and mass-manufacturability, so we had to rethink our designs, we had to rethink
our materials, and also rethink the user interactions. Learning to make prototypes in
a mattress manufacturing unit, now that's a very different experience! No more of the bunny suits,
no more of the using tweezers to handle our samples, we are actually screen-printing
sensors onto mattress protectors. Testing these, that was a very different experience
as well, we usually take our samples very delicately and place them on testing stages;
we used rollator machines. This is pretty similar to the machines which are used to lay down cricket
pitches, for instance, and we actually used these to test the durability of the sensors.
Now, a critical element which remains in front of our mind as we commercialise our technology
is mainly the user interaction. How will a user actually interact with these technologies?
A 20 year old will interact with a wearable very differently to a 70 year old. Form factor,
packaging, understanding what the sensor is trying to tell you, changing batteries - all
these are user interaction points which can make or break your decision to continue using
that particular wearable. We also have phenomenal collaborators in design who I have to call out,
and who we collaborate with, and they give us these valuable insights all the time.
Our vision is that wearables are a piece of art, which each one will love to wear and also love
to use. Now that brings me to my final piece of my story which is diversity in technology.
There are a lot of reports recently on how we live in a world which is designed
for men. So, right from male crash-test dummies to ill-fitting protective equipment,
to military equipment, to misdiagnosing a heart attack symptoms in women, or even
autism in women - we live in a world designed for men, predominantly by men. It's baffling to
think that the misdesign is for genders which represent over half the world's population,
but then, when you think about it, most decisions are made by people sitting around a table,
and if the people sitting around the table do not reflect the diversity of your target audience,
chances are your innovation will not be made to match the audience either.
There are some rare examples of where people with lived experience are making technology
or products to suit themselves - there are pencil sharpeners, for instance, for left-handed people!
Or Crayola introduced a big bunch of coloured pencils so that kids can actually draw skin tones
to depict realistic people. But these are very few and they are far in between. So as a technologist,
how can I set this right going forward? I'll again give you two examples in this particular case, and
I'm going to go back to the REMI example. So in the case of REMI, where I go and present my work
in, say, Asia, where we're talking about putting sensors in mattresses and doing non-invasive
monitoring of residents in an aged care home, I usually get two very different reactions:
one is from a section of the Asian audience where usually people choose to age at home, and it's the
responsibility of the younger population such as myself to actually care for the ageing population.
Now, for people like them, we actually want this information available in the form of an app,
so I can check in on my Mum or Dad's quality of sleep during the course of the night,
and that's one of the things which we are working on. So it's not just
about a dashboard for carers in homes, it's also about having an app version for the same thing.
The other reaction I get from Asia is "this is too complicated, why don't we just put a
camera in the room? You get all the information which you ever need about the person's safety."
Privacy and safety are two very different things! And I guess the balance between the two is a very,
very cultural lens to the whole thing. So as you can clearly see, ageing is something which
has a cultural lens to it, and so aged care and the technology which we develop for that
also needs to take that into account. My second example, we recently had a project where we had
to develop ultraviolet light sensors, or UV sensors as you call them. Now, we live in the
land of skin cancer and these particular patches are actually worn on your skin, and they change
colour to kind of give you the warning that you've had too much UV exposure for the particular day.
Now we all know UV causes skin damage, but then we also need UV to produce vitamin D in the skin.
And most importantly the amount of UV which either causes damage or is required in vitamin
D production, it changes based on skin type. So if you take someone like me,
I actually need much more UV to produce vitamin D or to cause skin damage. So, when we had to do
this, we took one look at the table, and thankfully I co-lead a diverse group - I
looked around the table and I realised we have at least four different skin types between us.
So we didn't design one sensor, we designed six sensors for six different skin types.
And again, this is an example of where one size - or one technology - does not fit all.
So as a technologist, I would love to see a world where technology can be customised.
And by customised, I don't mean just changing the colour, or changing the finish, I actually mean
taking into account diversity in all its forms, be it age, culture, gender or beyond. Thank you!