Industry, students, the public and the media met the innovators of the future at The University of Queensland 2003 Innovation Expo on Friday, October 31.
The free event, an initiative of UQ’s School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering (ITEE), showcased ideas and research from some of the University’s leading information technology and electrical engineering students.
Queensland Minister for Innovation and Information Economy Paul Lucas joined Vice-Chancellor Professor John Hay on a tour of the projects at the UQ Centre.
Innovation Expo Project Manager Jon Whitty said the fourth annual Innovation Expo presented leading scientific research in a fun and interactive way.
“There was so much to see and interact with: from an automatic cocktail maker to a credit-card size electrocardiogram; a smart cricket ball to a Global Positioning System based aircraft collision avoidance system,” he said.
“These were just a few of the 350 research projects displayed across a range of industry sectors including education, telecommunications, transport, health and medicine, science, manufacturing and energy.”
The winner of the Queensland Rail prize for Best Poster went to Kok Kiaw Teo for his project on Low Cost Real-Time Number Plate Recognition. Jessica Lambourn and Jamil Khan’s Portable ECG Logger won the RS Components prize for Best Piece of Working Electronics Hardware and the Institution of Electrical Engineers (IEE) prize for Best Working System.
PhD student Jong Foo displayed his pulse transit time monitoring system for sleep disordered breathing in children, which is currently being tested at the Mater Children’s Hospital Sleep Unit. ITEE senior lecturer Dr Stephen Wilson and sleep scientist Gordon Williams are supervising the project.
It is hoped the device will be of benefit in the early diagnosis of sleep related breathing disorders and lead to low cost screening tests.
Dr Wilson said testing had recently presented very positive results in the detection of obstructive apnoea in children.
“Because the sensors and equipment are relatively inexpensive and not harmful, pulse transit time measurements are attractive to clinicians who have difficulty measuring airway obstruction in sleep, particularly in children,” Dr Wilson said.
Sponsors included Queensland Rail, Queensland Government Department of Innovation and Information Economy and technology incubator i.lab.
For more information visit www.innovexpo.itee.uq.edu.au
Media: For more information, contact Jon Whitty (telephone 07 3365 9797, email jonw@itee.uq.edu.au) or Dr Stephen Wilson (telephone 07 3365 4449, email wilson@itee.uq.edu.au) or Chris Saxby at UQ Communications (telephone 07 3365 2479, email c.saxby@uq.edu.au).
