Prize-winning talent for invention

7th June 2013

Prize-winning talent for invention

Biomimetics researcher, Daniel Xu’s talent for invention won him two prizes in the recent 2013 Spark Ideas Challenge.

He won a Commercial prize for his creation, Danimal, and led the team that won the Computer Science prize with InfinityTek.

‘Danimal’ is a concept for a stretchy film that has special sensing electronics and algorithms for use with motion-capture clothing for creating computer-generated imagery in films and sport. These sensing skins will be lightweight, soft, inexpensive and unobtrusive to wear.

Daniel’s interests in sports and motion capture technology, led him to explore how to use motion capture to help with getting peak performance in sports.

He hopes to develop motion capture clothing that is light and compliant like a second layer of skin that can be connected wirelessly to capture motion data from the wearer and store it for later analysis.

“In sports there are often small limitations holding people back from giving peak performance. I’m working on ways around that by developing this motion capture system,” he says.

The InfinityTek idea originated with Daniel who worked with three other team members to develop the concept. His collaborators are two fellow mechtronics graduates, Ming Cheuk and Muthu Chidambaram and computer science graduate, Jacky Zhen.

The InfinityTek device will help people manage their sun exposure by offering personal UV sensors that connect wirelessly to a smartphone to monitor the user’s exposure to UV and provide alerts when they are in danger of getting sunburnt.

“We looked at what causes skin cancer – over-exposure to sunlight – and realised people have no way of knowing how much exposure is ok for them in certain conditions,” says Daniel. “We wanted to take the uncertainty out of that”.

The team have built a tiny lightweight, personal UV sensor that can be worn as a watch wristband or on hat or sunglasses, programmed for each person’s own sun exposure. It’s able to be calibrated to different skin types, and connects to a person’s own smartphone to record sun exposure. InfinityTek can also send information to a cloud storage where scientists can later analyse grouped data.

The concept won the New Zealand finals of the Microsoft Imagine Cup in March, so the team leave in July to represent New Zealand in the world finals of that competition in St Petersburg in Russia.

ENDS

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