Stephanie O’Neill (Discover Science & Engineering): Good afternoon everybody. And welcome here to the Science Gallery. I am delighted to see you all. We have two schools here today. You don’t know each other I’m sure. So it’s Coláiste Phádraig in Lucan and… [audience remarks] sorry, I was going to say the gentlemen from Coláiste Phádraig in Lucan. And a lady who is well able to handle them, I’m sure, is Agnes Hackett. So thanks, Agnes, for bringing them out today. And I’m sure they’ll be on their best behaviour. Also here today we have ladies and gentlemen from Old Bawn Community School. [audience cheers] OK, guys it’s not a competition today. And the teacher travelling with them today is Edel McGovern. So welcome Edel.
My job today is just basically to introduce the speakers, but also to tell you a little bit about Discover Science & Engineering, which is the body that I work for. Discover Science & Engineering is a government-funded awareness programme to promote Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths, both to students and to the general public. In terms of the general public and indeed students, we run Science Week. And this week there’s over 400 events happening all around the country. You can find out about any more of those events, if you want to log onto the scienceweek.ie website. And there’s a very good search engine in there as well, to search for any events in your area. There’s loads of them going on, as I said, over 400 happening right around the country.
Also on a general note, we promote science careers and we also have a website there called, mysciencecareer.ie. So if you want to have a look at that in your spare time, that would be great as well. We also take part in the Young Scientist competition. We are a gold partner with Young Scientist. We’ll have a huge stand there. And we hope we’ll see you all there in January. Our theme this year is "The Science of Sport". I do know we are going to have a Formula One car there this year. So please come to our stand and support us at the Young Scientist. There’ll be loads of other stuff demonstrating how science is used in sport there. On the education side - and this is where I work - we have two major projects. One is called ‘Discover Primary Science’. That’s well up and running now for a number of years. And we’re working with over 3,000 primary schools in the country with that project. That’s over 3,000 out of 3,300 schools. So we’re thrilled with that. The projects that we do on secondary school levels, there’s two of them. One is called ‘Discover Sensors’. And incorporated into that then is ‘Project Blogger’, where we actually get kids and teachers to use a blogging tool to blog experiments and projects. So we’re working with Young Scientist this year and we’re getting some of the students who are entering the Young Scientist to work with us and to actually blog about their projects and how they’re getting on with their projects. And the same thing with the SciFest next May. So that’s ‘Project Blogger’.
The project then that I am responsible for is ‘Discover Sensors’. And I suppose that’s where we link up today with Cian here. Discover Sensors – we are now working with 200 Junior Certificate teachers this year. And basically what we’re doing is working with your teachers using sensor technology to promote enquiry-based teaching and learning. I know that sounds very high-falutin'. But you’ve all heard I’m sure the government and politicians in general talking about higher order thinking, about a knowledge based economy, and all this high-falutin' stuff. Basically what we’re trying to do is to work with Junior Certificate Science teachers, who in turn will work with you. So that rather than just learning your science stuff off by heart and writing it out, that you’ll actually learn how to think, how to ask really important questions. Basically instead of learning everything – now I know there’s a certain amount of stuff you actually have to learn. But instead of learning everything by rote, you learn how to find out about things. You learn how to ask questions. You learn where to go to find out about things. Basically what you’re doing is learning how to think. And that feeds into what the government wants in our higher level thinking and knowledge based economy. So that’s enough about Discover Science & Engineering.
I want to introduce now, Dr Cian Ó Mathúna from Clarity. He’s one of the six principal investigators in Clarity. But he tells me he’s the most important one. I don’t know if that’s true or not. Clarity is a Science Foundation-funded Centre for Science, Engineering and Technology. And it’s a partnership between UCD, DCU and the Tyndall Institute. But Cian is actually based at the Tyndall Institute. Indeed, he is the Head of the Microsystems Centre there. And what he’s going to talk about today is “Sensing the Future”. Basically he is going to talk about how wireless sensor networks are set to play a major role in addressing some of the key challenges facing society in healthcare, in the environment and in the energy in our buildings. What I’m hoping is that today we’ll hear about how science, technology, engineering and maths research is actually being used in real life situations. So I’m going to hand over to Cian now.
Dr. Cian Ó Mathúna: Thank you very much. I’m delighted to be here. I hope you can understand my accent. I was practising my Dublin and it didn’t work. [Laughter] The guys, they were going to do subtitles, but we decided it wasn’t necessary. Hands up who has been in Cork? [Audience: show of hands] [Audience remark] Nice one. It’s all out now. So Cork is really the capital of Ireland, as everyone is aware. The Tyndall National Institute, we actually had an opening last week of a €50m building, which is going to dramatically expand the work that we can do. And it’s very important in terms of, you know, the current economic situation in Ireland. A lot of you people are going to be wondering, "Well where am I going to get jobs in the future?" Well five years ago I guess your mothers and fathers would have said, "Go into the bank." And actually it might be a good idea to go into the bank now, because we’re supporting all the banks. However, I think we can add more value by getting involved in science and engineering, that can impact on some of the very significant problems that are facing mankind in the future – the environment, health and also the whole energy question.
So I’m going to talk you through some of that. In Tyndall we have 370 researchers, engineers, scientists. We have 100 graduate students. We have people from all over the country coming to work in Tyndall. It’s a national institute. We work on the hardware side of electronics, opto-electronics and so on. On the photonics side we are interested in how do you get fibre to the home, optical fibre, so that you can actually automatically download movies on demand. I guess most parents would think that would be a really stupid use of technology. Also looking at nanotechnology, we’re trying to develop technology that you won’t be able to see, but will have dramatic impact on how we live our lives in the future. [Slide: John Tyndall information] I guess you all know who John Tyndall was. [Laughter] Now there will be an exam at the end of this. So listen up. In any case, it’s important. John Tyndall, he was a very important scientist, physicist. Some of you may have done some work in the chemistry lab with Bunsen burners. Right, yes? John Tyndall was, I think, the second PhD student of Professor Bunsen in Heidelberg in Germany. He also took over from Michael Faraday as Director of the Royal Institute in London. So he is a very important person. He has done a lot of work in the area of medical technology, in the area of optics, photonics. And he explained why the sky was blue.
Now actually last year, when we had the Clarity open day, we went to this place, Leighlinbridge in County Carlow. The sky is not blue in County Carlow. [Laughter] I reckon that’s why he went to Germany to try and understand. [Slide: Mission statement for the Tyndall Institute] Now the mission for Tyndall, and this is important, right. Because what we are doing is, we are spending taxpayers’ money. And, you know, many of the people in the government are under a lot of pressure at the moment as to how that money should be spent. Some people are saying actually it should be spent in hospitals, in healthcare. There’s a lot of children who need better care. There’s a lot of people have to go outside the country in order to get proper care and attention. It should be spent on the road infrastructure. It should be spent on the banks. But that’s why it’s so important for us to be able to account for the work that we’re doing in science and engineering technology, and deliver value back to Ireland.
So that is a critical element of what we’re doing, working with industry in order to create new jobs, the jobs of the future - hopefully that many of you will work in. So I’ll just take you to a book that was written in 2000 by a gentleman, Michio Kaku. And he is not from Cork. Now he wished to talk about "The Invisible Computer". And I mean he makes a startling statement. He says that "Microprocessors in the future will be as cheap as scrap paper and just as plentiful." So basically we will not be paying any money for silicon chips, which is pretty surprising. But on the other hand if you think of… how many of you have mobile phones? [Audience: responses] What a country! Now what you will find is, you know, increasingly you’re paying very little for your mobile phone. You’re probably, you know, paying maybe €30 or less. In fact it’s your parents who are buying it so you’re not paying anything. But the thing about this is, that what you are paying for is the services associated with it. But this technology, the amount of technology in this [holds a mobile phone] is very very significant.
One of my friends, he went into one of the DIY stores recently, and he wanted to buy a DVD player. The DVD player that he spotted, it was €30. And a lady came along to help him, you know, pick out the unit. And she said, ‘Would you like some shelves in order to put the DVD player on.’ He says, ‘Yes, that would be nice.’ And she said, ‘Well here’s a box kit, you can make it up yourself.’ ‘OK, great, how much is that?’ ‘That’s €100.’ So the wood cost €100 and the technology to watch the DVDs was €30. That’s frightening. And that is saying that in the future the electronics will cost nothing, but the services around it will actually be where all the value will be.
Now in Tyndall, in the area that I’m working in, we are looking at developing technologies around sensors that will impact on energy, the environment and health. So first of all what are sensors? And do we have sensors in the world today? Yes, we do. If you think of car alarms, if you think of house alarms, if you think of video systems for security in streets, if you think of home appliances where you can actually monitor the temperature - a kettle has a temperature sensor in it in order to turn it off when the water is boiling. So there are a lot of sensors around our environment at the moment. However, they’re not connected to anything. They’re what I would describe as dumb sensors. And what we’re interested in doing is making these intelligent and eventually connecting them up to the Web, so that they can make intelligent decisions about what they can do. And they can support society, people, in terms of improving their health, the quality of their lives, their environment and so on.
If you look here at, I guess, a technical slide as to what sensors would be, [Slide: ‘Microsystems Definition – MIT Model’] then we can describe the sensors that will detect light, sound, pressure, chemical species, temperature and so on, that would feed into the electronics, that will convert the data from an analogue signal to a digital signal. And then it will have to make some decision about what it should do. Will it turn on a light? Will it turn off a light? Will it turn on a tap? Will it turn off a pump or something like that? And all of these will be communicating with each other as well. So in the future there will be billions of these throughout our environment.
Now what we’re trying to do is, we are trying to make these invisible. We want them to interface to the physical world. We want to embed intelligence in them, so we get smart sensors. They need to be as small as possible so they can be embedded into the environment, whether it’s into our clothing, in buildings, in the external environment, even inside in our bodies. They should be able to communicate wirelessly. And they’ll be networked together into very large, what are called ‘ad hoc networks’. And they will also be self-powered. So we won’t need batteries for them in the future. We will be able to harvest energy from the environment, whether it’s from light, vibration, movement and so on.
Here are some examples of the sort of sensors that we’re talking about, these intelligent sensors. [Slide: Images of Sensors with dimensions] We have built these so that many researchers can actually work on them. They are very Lego-like. So you can put them together as you would think fit. They’re a bit like maybe the Lego Mindstorms perhaps. [Shows a small sensor unit] And we would have about maybe 20 to 25 different versions of these that you can put together as you want, to do whatever experiment you want, whether it’s measuring building energy out in the environment, measuring external environmental conditions and so on. It’s a very suitable tool actually even for schools in terms of say the Young Scientists or Transition Year type programmes - so very suitable for the Discover Science & Engineering programme.
But what we’re interested in doing is trying to make those entities as small as possible. You can see, you know, could we actually get them small enough that they could fit in a syringe and actually get injected into the body? [Slide: Comparison Photos of Sensor and Ant - sensor is tiny compared to ant] I should say that no animals were harmed in the making of this particular slide. Now the other thing that we’re interested in doing is, if we go a step further, could we actually embed all of these sensors into a credit card? Or into a smart card. We make, put all the electronics into a smart card, so we end up with a wireless sensor smart card that can have…instead of just having a chip in it, that will give you money, it also has your ID, it has your medical records. But it also could be used in an environment like this to monitor temperature, humidity and so on. It could be used to monitor your security, if you’re away from home and so on. So this is what we’re trying to do. We are trying to make the electronics disappear.
Here are some examples of, let’s say, real-world ideas in terms of energy harvesting from the environment. [Slide: two photos – baseball cap with solar-powered fan, and a Power Purse] You can see a hat on the left there, where there is a solar cell on top of the hat for someone who wants to cool themselves down while walking. Now I guess my kids, my daughter in particular, she likes me to watch PowerPuff Girls with her. And I was a closet fan of the Spice Girls. But I think the Power Purse is taking girl power to the fair. But here you have a purse. What do you call them? Handbags - with solar cells on them. Now this idea of energy harvesting – let’s say if we talk about a building like this here. [Slide: Energy harvesting from the environment, including a thermoelectric generator (TEG), a vibrational generator and an indoor high-efficiency solar panel] OK, we have got light from the lights here. We may have radiators that will have a temperature. We can use the temperature difference, using the thermoelectric effect in order get energy that can be converted to electricity to drive these sensors. In another case we are using vibrations from pumps on motors in the air conditioning systems to actually drive the various sensors we’re talking about. So let’s get in to look at some of the applications. Just to put a context around applications for energy, right? [Slide: Worldwide Energy Usage] Worldwide energy usage – 27% of energy is used in transportation, 16% in residential houses, 8% commercial and 49% in industrial – factories and so on. If you just take the residential sector and look at it. [Slide: Residential Energy Usage] 38% is made up of electricity and the rest in combustibles, whether that’s gas or oil. And if you look there, 49% space heating, 16% water heating. That’s an incredible amount of energy. And if you think of your homes, they are probably not very well insulated. They need much better insulation. There are grants available to get that better insulation. We’re probably all using old-style lighting rather than modern energy-efficient lighting and so on. There’s a lot of work could be done to improve on the energy usage in the home. And sensors can be used to do that.
So if you take Ireland at the moment, there’s about 1.5…1.4 million houses in the country. We are using 40% of total energy in Ireland in houses. And 30% of the CO2 emissions are coming from those houses. They’re introducing EU Directives in order to reduce the energy usage. Many of you may have had people calling to your homes to actually measure the energy quality of your homes. Now the way to achieve better energy efficiency is actually to start using sensors in the home, so we could measure temperature in rooms, humidity, fresh air. We could measure occupancy. If people aren’t in the rooms there’s no point in having the heating on and so on. There’s no point in having the lights on.
And the issue there is, if we wired the sensors in they will cost a lot of money. However, if we use wireless sensors in a form like this [holds up the small sensor unit again] or in a form like the credit card, where they’re already able to communicate with each other, then we can reduce the cost dramatically. And ultimately what you want to be able to do is go to a DIY store, and you want to be able to buy these sensors and install them yourselves. So they should be programmable by screwdriver. There’s no point in me making fancy technology if you can’t use it. And that’s something that you need think about as well, if you’re getting into science and engineering. It’s not enough to be focused on how smart the technology is. You have to be able to make it useful. That’s the delivery of the value.
We have a range of programmes that we’re working on, funded by Science Foundation Ireland, Enterprise Ireland and so on. And we work with a range of companies, multinational companies and indigenous companies. And this is really important: to be working together across different institutes and universities in multi-disciplinary programmes, but working to take the technology out into industry. That’s a critical thing. That’s where the jobs are going to arise.
Let’s move on to environmental monitoring. There’s a lot of interest in water quality monitoring, monitoring blue flag beaches throughout the country. Air quality monitoring is of interest, and monitoring of landfill sites. Is there pollution in those landfill sites? Waste management. Some of you may have bin collection, refuse collection. There’s a chip in each bin. So when the bin is loaded onto the truck it’s weighed, and there’s data downloaded from the chip to say: ‘This person has paid their bill. No, they haven’t. If they haven’t it won’t be emptied.’ [Slide: photo of funny-looking fish, titled "The original biosensor"] This is a fish. [Laughter] And this is very important, because this is the original biosensor. So, you know, how do we find out if rivers are polluted? We wait until we see a fish turned upside down in the river. Now if you think about it, that’s a very interesting idea. If you could embed an accelerometer - you know the airbag accelerometers. - put one of those into each fish. When they turn upside down you will be able to detect – oh he has just turned upside down. And if you had some sort of GPS built into him as well with, you know, maybe some sort of energy harvesting technology, he could phone home and say, ‘I’m dead. I’m in Tallaght. Please help.’ And unfortunately that’s the way we do things.
Now the other way to do it is, once you find the dead fish you then go out and you take samples of water. You bring them back to a lab. You analyse them. That could take you three or four days. So it could take a long time before you find out there’s cryptosporidium in the water or whatever else. And that’s a big issue. What we’re trying to do is move towards a European Directive for water quality. So by 2015 all water sources throughout Europe – we’ll have to be able to confirm that they have good water quality. That’s an enormous undertaking. Now the way we’re going to do that is, we are not going to use fish. We are going to use autonomous sensing systems. So we want to be able to take a sensor system like this, throw it in the river, throw it in lakes, and it will know where it is, with GPS. It will be able to harvest energy from the environment, say solar energy. And it will be able to communicate home to say, ‘I’m polluted. I’m in Lucan at the moment – or is it Leixlip – Lucan.’ [Audience: response] ‘Lucan, yes, that’s where I am. I know. I know where I am. OK.’
So we’re working with the National Centre for Sensors Research in Dublin City University. We’re working with various companies, the Marine Institute, the EPA, in order to develop these systems. And again we’re working with companies, because it’s the companies that will commercialise this technology. So the idea would be that you’ll have buoys in the river, not girls, buoys. They will be able to communicate through the GSM system back into the Internet. So we’ll be able to upload the EPA, or even yourselves, will be able to look on the Internet to see is there pollution. In Cork we have these various systems in the River Lee running from Gougane Barra, its source, right through to Cork City. And all that data is being uploaded.
Now the problem at the moment is that all those sensors, they cost €1,000 each. So it’s very, very expensive. And there’s no way we are going to be able to deploy millions of these at that sort of cost. So a lot of the work is trying to reduce the cost of these sensors. Here’s some data on the Web, right, [Slide: screenshot of page from www.smartcoast.net] where you can look at different data for water temperature, the pH of the water, the conductivity of the water, the water depth. [Slide: Images of Water Testing and Instruments] So you’re getting information about the quality of the water. We’d also like to be able to understand, is there nutrients in the water, so we can start monitoring phosphates and so on. And that is a big test. Now we have a big problem, that the sensors we put in, they get attacked by the water obviously. There’s bio-fouling. They also get attacked by trees. And what is needed – on the one hand we can deal with the bio-fouling in that you can get self-cleaning chemical sensors or bio-sensors. That’s OK. However, our next wireless sensor system, it’s going to have radar on it to detect the trees and it’s going to have an automatic chainsaw. [Laughter]
Alright, let’s get on to health. So what do you think is the greatest killer of people? [Audience response: Cancer] Cancer. Smoking. [Audience responses] It’s not ecstasy. It’s not ecstasy. [Audience responses] Alright, exam over. Exam over. And it’s not living in Limerick either. Alright. You can talk about non-communicable diseases. Cardiovascular disease, cancer, mental health problems, diabetes, respiratory disease, etc, right? Now these non-communicable diseases, they cause 86% of deaths in the European region. That’s 53 member states - and 77% of the disease burden. So which is the biggest of these? Cardiovascular disease causes more than 50% of all deaths in Europe. [Slide: Leading causes of death in Europe] Cardiovascular disease? That’s to do with the heart. And look where cancer is - half of the deaths from cardiovascular disease and cancer, all cancers, 19%. And look at the reasons that the problems associated with many of these non-communicable diseases – high blood pressure, tobacco. [Slide: Seven leading risk factors] How many people smoke in here? [Audience: show of hands] How many people drink? [Audience: show of hands] There’s one drinker in the audience. OK. Look at this one here. Low fruit and vegetable intake is a significant issue in terms of the diseases we’re talking about. And physical inactivity is a significant issue.
So, you know, our health system is about caring for people who are sick. But it’s not about prevention of ill health. Or it’s not about improving the quality of people’s lives by changing the way that they live their lives. Now actually Ireland did lead in terms of banning smoking from pubs. But there’s much more needs to be done in terms of impact on alcohol, in terms of obesity in the population, in terms of promoting the eating of proper foods and so on, and in terms of promoting physical activity. So going back to cardiovascular health, heart disease kills 4.35 million people each year in the European region. Look at this. [Slide: Statistics from European Heart Health Charter] 55% of all deaths in women and only 43% in men. Girls, what are you doing? You’re working too hard. You need to get the boys to do some work. But look at the healthcare costs. 57% is due to the healthcare costs. But look, 21% of the costs, €169 billion cost to Europe, and 21% is due to productivity losses. Death and illness among people of working age. And 22% due to the informal care of people – so care of people at home. And 80% of heart disease could be avoided. It could be eliminated if we just attacked some of the factors that are causing the problems – physical activity and so on.
So public health policies need to change dramatically. And it’s you people – I’m too old already, I’m going to die shortly, right? But it’s you people are the future. And you’re the people who are going to have to put these policies in place, yourselves first of all, in your homes, in your communities. And in terms of implementing the technologies needed in the future to have people, not so much live longer - you know, it is almost easy nowadays to live longer. The problem is to live longer with a high quality of life. I’ll just talk you through what we are doing in Clarity for sport and fitness. One of the projects we’re working on is, trying to put electronics around a tennis court scenario. How many people play tennis? [Audience: show of hands] We are working with Tennis Ireland in Dublin City University - we have sensors on the tennis courts, so you can actually track the player and you can help them in terms of analysing their performance and in terms of coaching. And we picked tennis because it’s particularly easy. There’s only two players involved at any one time.
Now what we are doing, we want to be able to measure the movement of the individuals or the movement of the tennis racket or of the ball. So what we are doing is, we’re taking these sensors and we’re embedding them with inertial sensors - accelerometers and so on – into these units. Now you could imagine… I mean you could think of a new game couldn’t you? You know. I could call it, Me. We could call it, Us. We. So it already exists. How many people have a Wii? [Audience: show of hands] I nearly said, how many people want to wee, sorry. [Laughter] We’ve also used it in field sports with football and so on, where we’ve actually had an intelligent vest. It’s got sensors built into the vest itself. And we can actually put the data up on a computer, so that the sports players can actually see where they’re moving on the pitch, or the coach can see. We’ve actually used it in Croke Park. One of the referees, Paddy Russell, used it. It didn’t save him from getting abused by various Dublin players I can tell you. [Laughter]
So let’s move on another little bit to ambient assisted living. So we talked about how people are going to live longer. [Slide: Life Expectancy Chart] Right, so if you look there in 1950 the average life expectancy for people in Ireland, you know, your grandparents perhaps was - what is it there? – 65…70. Whereas in 20 years you guys are going to be expecting to live over 80 years of age. In fact, I mean, by the time you’re 80 you’re probably going to live until 90. The Alzheimer Society of Ireland, they have some data, right, which talks about, you know, the conditions of people who get dementia. And this is very sad. And many of you may have grandparents or older parents who have these problems. But the issue is that the population increase over the next say 30 years in Ireland, it will increase by about 40%. But if you look there, dementia is going to increase by 300%. That is enormous. It’s going to go from about 30,000 up to over 100,000 people. Hopefully my kids are going to be looking after me. I won’t know who they are, but they bloody well better look after me.
But there’s a big problem about this, right. If you look at the cost of hospitals and of people in homes, the cost is very significant per week. That’s going to be a big problem for many people. They’re not going to have the money to do this, and the healthcare system won’t be able to afford it. Now if we could actually have people living at home with electronic sensors in the buildings, in their homes, and outside their homes, that would protect them, give them security, give them a good quality of life, we could reduce the cost to the health system dramatically. And we could potentially greatly enhance the quality of life of these people. One of our projects is looking at the idea of monitoring, with sensors, the personal space, the environment, monitoring outdoor activities, in case they decide to go off on their own, or with someone else, and established patterns of movement around the house. If you can establish patterns for older people, you can decide, you know, are they actually – are they getting enough activity, are they getting enough physical activity? Is their condition deteriorating over a period of weeks? And you can actually then use the computer systems to determine that, and to do something about it.
There’s a lot of sensors available that can do this. Some of them are being used in homes already. There’s other ones that can be used. And all of these sensors then will be connected into the Internet and into the Web. So let’s move on another bit to nanotechnology in sensors. Many of you will be familiar with pacemakers. They’ve been used in electronics for maybe 30, 40 years. Anybody seen the movie "Fantastic Voyage"? [Audience responses] Yeah, you don’t get TV in Dublin. Right, OK. "Inner Space"? [Audience responses] Alright, "Ozzy and Drix". [Audience responses] "The Belly of the Boss", did you see that? Did you see "The Simpsons"? "Belly of the Boss"? [Audience responses] OK, well the idea in "Fantastic Voyage" was that they put a spaceship with surgeons into a person’s body in order to attack a bold spaceship, an enemy spaceship, inside in the body. Now when they were removing the spaceship from the body – or in fact, I watched it the other night, they didn’t remove the spaceship they just removed the surgeons after they had fixed the problem. They removed them in a tear drop. So they took the tear drop out and then they were able to enlarge them. The Simpsons couldn’t do it the simple way. They used a different orifice completely to remove Lisa, I think it was.
So we are working on an idea of a swallowable pill for gut analysis. You can swallow this pill, it will go through the gut and it will wirelessly communicate to a personal digital assistant or a mobile phone that the doctor has in order to determine what's the condition of the gut. And this is much easier than you having to go into hospital and getting a laparoscopy or a gastroscopy. In fact here’s one that I swallowed yesterday. [Demonstrates pill and offers it to the front row in the audience] I'm joking, they are disposed of carefully.
Here’s another idea. We are working on silicon microneedles. So we can build tiny, tiny needles. And these needles are so small that when you stick them into the skin they actually don’t get to the nerves. So you don’t feel any pain. We’ve a whole load of drug bosses who are really interested in this idea. But more seriously we’re working with the Cork Cancer Research Centre, and they have a great interest in this idea. And the reason is that if you think of cancer treatment at the moment - when people get cancer treatment, radiation treatment and so on – the whole body is effectively poisoned. Their hair falls out. They’re sick for months and so on. What we’re looking at doing is, could you do localised cancer treatment. And what that would mean is, in this case we are using what’s called electroperations. What you can do is, if we bring these needles close to the tumour, if you apply an electric field in the region of the tumour, the cell wall of the tumour becomes porous. So you can start introducing gene therapy into the tumour cells, locally. And therefore you can start killing those cells. The Cork Cancer Research Centre have had some extraordinary results in this space. They now need to move on to clinical trials in order to prove the ideas. But it’s really exciting. And it’s exciting as well because we’re combining technology from science and engineering with the real world applications in cancer therapy.
So let’s come back to Clarity. Clarity is very important in the context of taking all the data from sensors. And, of course, the important thing about sensor data is, there’s a lot of data from billions of sensors. But the only thing that’s of use is information. And information is about, ‘Am I sick? How sick am I? Is the water polluted? Where is it polluted?’ Information is small amounts of data. And that’s where all the value is going to be. We’re interested in harnessing data from around the body, on the body and in the body. Now if you think of the World Wide Web at the moment, right. You originally had the Web. Now you’ve the social web. Have you got Facebooks? [Audience responses: Yes] Twitters? [Audience responses: Yes] OK. The Twits are here, right. But the next thing actually is the sensor web.
And the sensor web – what that’s going to do is, it’s going to enable us to take all the data from all of the sensors that we will have around our environment, probably through our mobile phones, and load them onto the Web so we can start getting more and more information about our environment. Many of you probably get very fancy – do you call them skins for your phones? [Audience responses] What do you call these? [Audience responses] Covers. Right, OK. In Cork we call them skins. But these are dumb, right. It’s just a bit of plastic. But in the future, very soon, they will have sensors built into them. So you will actually be able to monitor the environment. And can you imagine if you were able to log onto Vodafone or say to the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency). The EPA will pay you so that all of you with your mobile phones on a certain day will make your mobile phones available so that the EPA will be able to download sensor data from your phones and determine what’s the quality of the air in Lucan or in Tallaght. That would be a powerful usage of mobile phone technology.
The other thing that’s important to think about is, if you’re getting involved in the whole sensor area or science and engineering technology area, increasingly it’s a multi-disciplinary space. You work from the sensors. You work with computer science people. You work with the mobile phone people. So you have material science people, you’ve engineers, computer scientists. You’ve sports scientists, physiotherapists. You’ve industry partners. In the future the individual is going to have to be subsumed into teams, so that people can work together and try and understand each other in order that we can add value and have an impact on this world.
So bringing it back to reality, euros. The government has a strategy. And there’s a lot of people at the moment you will hear who are saying, ‘Don’t spend money on the public service. Cut salaries in the public service. Get rid of the pensions. Get rid of the banks. Get rid of the hospitals.’ And they’re going to have to do something drastic. And some people are saying, ‘Forget about the science and technology. It’s not that important. It’s a waste of money.’ Well I would say, ‘It isn’t a waste of money.’ And luckily the Irish government is very focused on putting more money into this space, educating you people, and hoping that you guys are going to go into science and technology programmes in third level, and make a difference over the next 20 or 30 years. Thank you very much for your attention. [Applause] I understand I’m supposed to ask if there are any questions. It doesn’t mean I’m going to answer them.
Question from the audience: What would you say to someone that said putting some of the sensors in homes was an invasion of privacy? [Audience cheers]
Dr. Cian Ó Mathúna: That was a very good question. That’s a very important point. And it’s a bit like, you know, with…I mean if you think of some of the technology we have at the moment. Say on your mobile phone there are services that you wish to access, so you are in control of accessing them. Or on Facebook or Twitter or whatever else, you can decide what access you want your friends or whoever else to have. And that’s a very important element that needs to sit underneath that whole infrastructure. So you’re right. Let’s say if you take old people in the home. They may not want people to know how they’re getting on. My mother-in-law, for instance, God rest her. She definitely didn’t want to know how she was getting on or want anyone else to know about her. And that’s an important element. So there has to be a balance, you know, of being able to use technology appropriately to enhance quality of life, but not to undermine people’s privacy and their individuality.
Question from the audience: The sensors, are they unique to Ireland or are they worldwide?
Dr. Cian Ó Mathúna: No, this is worldwide. I have described to you really what Ireland is doing. In fact the Irish government funding for this type of work between Clarity and many other programmes, there’s about €100 million invested in this area. There’s about 200 scientists and engineers working in this area. But it is the same across Europe. It’s the same in the US, the same in Japan. So we are, I guess, in a global race to develop this technology and to make it useful.
Question from the audience: How long does it take to make one of the sensors?
Dr. Cian Ó Mathúna: Typically if we were making it, we would make it on say silicon technology in our silicon fabrication laboratory in Tyndall. And it would take about two weeks to make that sensor. Now if Intel were making it, because Intel would be working 24 hours a day on three shifts and so on, in Leixlip, they could make it maybe in, you know, two or three days. And then what you have to do with that sensor, you have to combine it with all the other electronic components in order to deliver the final system that’s going to be used.
Question from the audience: Why are sensors so expensive?
Dr. Cian Ó Mathúna: What I was describing to you, the expensive sensors, these were the ones that went into the water. They were €1,000 each. The reason those are so expensive is because there’s not many of them made at the moment. And they need to be very robust for that water environment. However, the great thing about silicon technology is that when you make one chip you make millions of chips, because you make them on a large wafer. And each little chip is on that wafer. If we can get the sensors to go onto the silicon they will become very cheap. That’s why the mobile phone is so cheap, because the silicon chip has made the technology so cheap. Part of the research we’re doing is trying to find a way to make these sensors very cheap while still being robust, so that they have the self-cleaning, they don’t get attacked by the trees, etc. OK? [Applause]
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