Smart Sensing and Electronics

Microchips are increasingly designed to more closely resemble the neural structures of the human brain, using integrated mixed-signal circuits. And even better: it will soon be possible to use artificial intelligence locally, with less battery – thanks to edge AI.

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mioty® is a wireless transmission technology with a wide range of applications. As part of the “coffee series,” René Dünkler from Fraunhofer IIS and Reiner Sulzer from the coffee roasting company Espressone provide insights into how mioty® could be used in the various coffee manufacturing steps to ensure high quality.

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Given that the diagnosis of parasitic infections requires special expertise, medical laboratories must regularly demonstrate their ability to identify such parasites. Until now, this has usually called for logistically complex proficiency tests. Using the ParasiteWeb® digital platform, these tests can now be carried out much more easily online. Dr. Michaela Benz, an expert in medical image processing whose team is involved in the platform’s development, explains the benefits of ParasiteWeb®.

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Intelligent cities will employ a variety of technological, social and business-oriented approaches to become more sustainable and better places to live in. Fraunhofer IIS experts Nadja Hoßbach, Head of Innovation and Transformation Department, and Karlheinz Ronge, Head of Distributed Systems and Security Department, explain how.

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Facial recognition is a hot topic right now. Already in use in numerous sectors, it is being improved all the time. But it also carries the risk of abuse, such as the systematic surveillance of millions of people. This article explains why SHORE is immune to such misuse, what makes the technology special and what its future looks like.

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The SEC-Learn (Sensor Edge Cloud for Federated Learning) project, involving eleven Fraunhofer Institutes, promises a major technological leap in the field of neuromorphic hardware: for the first time, a chip is being developed to accelerate spiking neural networks (SNN) in conjunction with what is known as federated learning. This would offer practical benefits for companies and individuals.

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Christian Hofmann, Group Manager at Fraunhofer IIS, is working on the development of “CardioTEXTIL”: a textile-integrated sensor system that conveniently enables continuous monitoring of cardiac activity. #WeKnowHow

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The Nuremberg Metropolitan Region, with its global players and its Medical Valley partner network, is already seen as a Bavarian lighthouse for the medical technology industry with great international visibility. The Fraunhofer IIS Center for Sensor Technology and Digital Medicine broadens this spectrum. This is where novel smart health technologies will be developed and validated in a clinical environment, in part using AI-based solutions. The center is headed by Matthias Struck from the Image Processing and Medical Engineering department at Fraunhofer IIS.

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She is exceptionally talented in many respects. Dr. Theresa Götz, who indeed holds two doctorates – in physics and information science –  pursues her wide-ranging interests with both passion and dedication. And her career path reflects that variety: She had originally planned to become a hotel manager and chef with the ultimate aim of taking over her family’s restaurant. Then she won a youth research award, took part in the Fraunhofer Talent Academy, and completed her physics degree in record time. At the age of 26, she had successfully earned two doctorates, and she now works as chief scientist and deputy group manager of the Multimodal Human Sensing group at Fraunhofer IIS. We interviewed Theresa Götz about her career and her life.

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We’ve developed nanoSPECTRAL technology, which enables a large number of highly integrated spectral channels to be produced at very low cost. These production costs essentially remain constant, regardless of the number of spectral channels required. We achieve this by structuring metallic layers as part of the CMOS semiconductor fabrication process. Unlike with conventional optical filters, such as thin-film filters, no further processing steps are required to produce these optical nanostructures. #WeKnowHow

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Christian Weigand’s professional interests center around the digitalization of healthcare. He is head of the Mobile Health Lab for mobile and digital medicine in Bamberg and CTO of the Digital Health Application Center (dmac). Addressing the question of whether physicians will visit us in our living rooms in the future in an interview on the Innovationskünstler*innen im Gespräch (“Innovation artists in conversation”) podcast from the Innovationskunst initiative, Weigand discussed innovations in the area of telemedicine that are intended to facilitate communication between patients and medical staff. The conversation focused on the security and availability of medical data, as well as the significance for research.

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Christian Hofmann and his Medical Sensor Systems Group are working on the Filter4Flow project, which simplifies care for patients requiring respiratory assistance and could help avoid the feared bottlenecks in ventilation units. #WeKnowHow

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Computer architecture inspired by the human brain – to most people, this sounds rather abstract and removed from everyday life. Far from it: a research team from Fraunhofer IIS and Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) has developed neuromorphic hardware capable of detecting early signs of atrial fibrillation and considerably reducing the risk of stroke. In other words, this application has an entirely practical place in everyday life.

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Christian Weigand heads the Mobile Health Lab in Bamberg, Germany, and works at the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS. He explains how the pandemic management app can help support health authorities.

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Group manager Dr. Matthias Völker and senior engineer Dr. Markus Stahl-Offergeld both work in the Smart Sensing and Electronics Division at Fraunhofer IIS. They are currently working on “KI-PREDICT”, a project funded by Germany’s Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) devoted to on-sensor data processing supported by AI functions. For this project, the two experts are focusing on the development of a “sensor interface ASIC” with integrated AI functions. One of the partners in the “KI-PREDICT” project is Rolf Slatter, the managing director of Sensitec GmbH since 2009. Sensitec is a global market leader in high-quality, innovative magnetic sensor solutions. We asked Matthias Völker, Markus Stahl-Offergeld, and Rolf Slatter to tell us about the project and their collaboration.

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In the development of digital medicine, Fraunhofer IIS focuses on progression monitoring for people with chronic conditions. During the pandemic, this expertise has proved beneficial to two projects within Fraunhofer’s anti-coronavirus program: the pandemic management app for health authorities and the concept for a portable monitoring system for COVID-19 patients on normal hospital wards.

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The purpose of Edge AI is to relocate artificial intelligence to where it is needed: end devices. For this to work, however, processing operations cannot be too energy-intensive. In the ECSEL projects ANDANTE and TEMPO, researchers at Fraunhofer IIS are paving the way for this emerging technology with the development of suitable chips, algorithms, and tools.

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Professor Ute Schmid has been at the head of the Project Group Explainable AI (EAI) since January 2020. Schmid and her team explore ways to help users understand machine learning.

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In our interview, Professor Ute Schmid, head of the Comprehensible Artificial Intelligence project group and professor at the University of Bamberg, and Dominik Seuss, head of the Intelligent Systems group and head of the Image Analysis and Pattern Recognition business unit, describe in an interview how AI is constantly expanding to include more and more applications and further areas of implementation and explain why humans require transparency and explainability in AI systems.

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Some challenges are best faced shoulder to shoulder – like developing the chips, algorithms, and the hardware needed to integrate artificial intelligence directly into end devices, a paradigm also known as “Edge AI”. Marco Breiling, chief scientist at the Fraunhofer IIS Communication Systems division and Dr. Loreto Mateu, group manager at the Fraunhofer IIS Smart Sensing and Electronics division, talk about why their collaboration on Edge AI is so fruitful, and the benefits of working in an international team.

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