Smart Sensing and Electronics

How the use of mioty® can benefit coffee production

June 2, 2023

© Fraunhofer IIS

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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ParasiteWeb®: modern, virtual proficiency tests for medical laboratories

April 26, .2023

© Fraunhofer IIS

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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Smart cities: How does a city become fit for the future?

05.07.2022

© Fraunhofer IIS

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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Fraunhofer SHORE® technology – face detection and emotion analysis that meet the highest data protection standards

Smart Sensing and Electronics | 05. May 2022

SHORE® GUI
© Fraunhofer IIS

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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Fraunhofer-project SEC-Learn

Series: AI / 18.03.2022

Icon image - neuromorphic hardware
© zapp2photo – stock.adobe.com

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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How can cardiac activity be measured in a simple, integrated way and, above all, conveniently and comfortably?

Cognitive Sensor Technologies / Smart Sensing and Electronics / 20.12.2021

Textilintegrierte Sensoren für tragbare Mehrkanal-EKGs
© Fraunhofer IIS
Textile-integrated sensors of portable multichannel ECGs

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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Matthias Struck heads the Center for Sensor Technology and Digital Medicine

Cognitive Sensor Technologies / Smart Sensing and Electronics / 14.12.2021

© Fraunhofer IIS

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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Dr. Theresa Götz – Carving Out a Career Between Schnitzel and Solar Cells

Smart Sensing and Electronics / 7.10.2021

© Fraunhofer IIS/Paul Pulkert

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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How is a cost-effective solution for manufacturing spectral sensors possible?

Smart Sensing and Electronics / 20.9.2021

© Fraunhofer IIS/Valentin Schilling
Dr. Stephan Junger is head of the group "Optical sensors“ at Fraunhofer IIS

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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Innovation artists in conversation: Will the doctor come to us at home in the future?

Smart Sensing and Electronics / 19.7.2021

© Fraunhofer IIS

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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Fraunhofer vs. Corona: Smart respiratory assistance with virus filter for COVID-19 patients

Smart Sensing and Electronics / 7.5.2021

© Fraunhofer IIS/Giulia Iannicelli
As a group manager at Fraunhofer IIS, Christian Hofmann works on medical sensor systems. His focus is on researching and developing sensor technologies that capture and analyze health-related information.

 

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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Dramatically reducing the risk of stroke with neuromorphic hardware

Communication Systems / Smart Sensing and Electronics / Engineering of Adaptive Systems / 6.5.2021

© VDI/VDE-IT
The team from Fraunhofer IIS and FAU with its “Lo3-ML” (Low-power low-memory low-cost ECG signal analysis using ML algorithms) project triumphed as one of the four winning teams in the “energy-efficient AI system” pilot innovation competition.

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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Fraunhofer vs. Corona: Helping health authorities cope with coronavirus

Smart Sensing and Electronics / 5.5.2021

© Fraunhofer IIS/Giulia Iannicelli
Christian Weigand heads the "Mobile Health Lab" group of Fraunhofer IIS in Bamberg and is also CTO of the Fraunhofer spin-off "Digital Health Application Center" (dmac GmbH).

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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“KI-PREDICT” – Intelligent process monitoring with on-sensor signal preprocessing

Smart Sensing and Electronics / 27.4.2021

© Fraunhofer IIS

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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AI series – Edge AI: Energy-saving “building blocks” for smart end devices

Communication Systems / Smart Sensing and Electronics / 4.1.2021

© ©Siarhei - stock.adobe.com

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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Making machine learning explainable and transparent

Smart Sensing and Electronics / 2.12.2020

Prof. Ute Schmid
© Ute Schmid

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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Explainable AI

Smart Sensing and Electronics / 2.12.2020

Prof. Ute Schmid
© Ute Schmid

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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Edge AI: Stronger together

Communication Systems / Smart Sensing and Electronics / 21.12.2020

© ©Siarhei - stock.adobe.com

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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“People with cardiac arrhythmia are often unaware that anything is wrong.”

Cognitive Sensor Technologies / Smart Sensing and Electronics / 12.12.2018

© Fraunhofer IIS
Florian Dennerlein (left) and Christian Hofmann with the intelligent sports shirt.

With its FitnessSHIRT, Fraunhofer IIS has developed a prototype that can measure a range of different vital signs. The ambiotex company has turned the shirt into a market-ready product. In an interview, the company’s CEO Florian Dennerlein and Christian Hofmann from Fraunhofer IIS explain why the shirt is better than a sports watch, and what people who exercise can expect in the future.

“We can develop assistance systems that tell people if their pasta sauce is still OK to eat.”

Cognitive Sensor Technologies / Smart Sensing and Electronics / 20.11.2018

© iStock.com/PeopleImages
Im »Campus der Sinne Erlangen« wollen die Fraunhofer-Institute IIS und IVV sowie die Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg gemeinsam mit Unternehmen menschliche Sinneserfahrungen erforschen und digital umsetzen.

For the fourth time in a year, Mr. Winter is sick in bed with an upset stomach. He had no way of knowing that the pasta sauce from the day before had gone bad: an infection he contracted a few years ago has robbed him of his senses of smell and taste. The Campus of the Senses is working on ways to digitally simulate the human senses. In our interview, the initiators of the Campus Prof. Albert Heuberger, Prof. Andrea Büttner and Dr. Jens-Uwe Garbas talk about assisting people with perception impairments and the difficulties inherent in the research.

The idea and development of the ultra-low power RFicient ® wake-up receiver

Cognitive Sensor Technologies / Smart Sensing and Electronics / 19.1.2018

© Fraunhofer IIS
A wakeUp radio module powered by a strawberry battery.

The Internet of Things requires a lot of wireless receivers. How can we design them so that they save energy and don’t need much maintenance? Dr. Frank Oehler and Dr. Heinrich Milosiu have been dealing with this question since June 2007. Here is the development story of the RFicient® wireless receiver chip, which receives signals continuously, but consumes just one-thousandth of the electricity used by an LED.

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