Team plans biohazard detection technology

THE detection of MRSA and other hospital bugs could help save lives and improve patient care for thousands of people around the world — and the technology to do it is being developed by Irish scientists.

The project to find ways of recording biohazards in hospitals to a central network is just one aspect of the work planned under a €13.5 million research plan to be led by a team at Cork Institute of Technology, where lead researcher Dirk Pesch explained the use of Network Embedded Systems.

“Embedded systems are like small computers or microprocessors that are part of everyday devices. In a car, for example, a microprocessor controls the airbag which is inflated when a car crashes,” he said.

“About 90% of these microprocessors are embedded in everyday devices, items for medical use, in phones, our cars or in security devices such as cards used to open doors in offices or other buildings.”

Cork University Hospital is one of the college’s partners in the research programme, for which €5.9m for a dedicated building at CIT and a further €7.6m for the research programme itself is being provided.

Although led by CIT, it will involve collaboration with the Tyndall National Institute in Cork, University College Cork, Trinity College Dublin and University College Dublin.

The funding is part of the €230m awarded by the Government in the latest phase of its programme for research in third level institutions last week.

While embedded technology has been in use for 30 years, the next stage of development is to network them together in what Dr Pesch says is described as ‘the internet of things’ — as distinct from the internet linking our computers at home and in work.

They have already devised an indoor location tracking system, which can detect a person’s location in a building using wireless technology and pinpoint it on a floor plan on a network user’s screen.

Under an Enterprise Ireland-funded project, the CIT team is also developing an embedded network of sensors that would monitor temperatures in homes to control heating and lighting and help save energy.

The latest funding boost will significantly help expand the work, with the provision of 40 PhD students, 10 postdoctoral researchers and a team of support staff.

“If we had technology to detect MRSA, for example, we could place little sensors around hospitals to monitor the presence of a biohazard and alert it back to the ‘internet’ or network, you could then check if this hospital is clean in terms of biohazards,” Dr Pesch said.

Another planned trial is the development of a street light management system in conjunction with Cork City Council, which approached CIT with the idea of controlling lighting based on street occupancy to save energy costs.

“In hotels, the light comes on when you enter a corridor but real time information on traffic could control traffic lights and street lights. There’s a single embedded system in the yard light sensor in a house, that switches on the light if something passes it, but for city streets it would be a whole network of embedded systems,” Dr Pesch said.

Much of the work done on network embedded systems at CIT in recent years has focused on how to increase the life of microprocessors, reduce the size of the devices they work from, and improve the ability of systems to communicate with each other on a network basis.

The hope is that the latest funding will help increase the level of work being done, with a major potential for patenting of systems which, by their nature, need not be very expensive for end users, whether they are businesses, hospitals or homes.