I-Corps Team: Battery-Free, Millimeter-Scale Silicon Devices for Tempertature Monitoring

这个i-Corps项目的更广泛的影响/商业潜力是确保温度调节供应链的完整性。在制药和食品行业，温度中断可能会导致效力或安全性的丧失，导致对公众健康的不利影响和成本增加。例如，目前的每种新冠肺炎疫苗在运输过程中都需要自己特定的环境条件，从-70摄氏度到5摄氏度不等。偏离这个温度范围可能会导致疫苗损坏，无法按预期发挥作用。在疫苗分发范围内，由于缺乏每瓶温度监测信息，可能会有大量疫苗瓶被丢弃。尽管新冠肺炎强调了这一问题，但全球对小型廉价温度传感器的需求仍然存在，这种传感器可以验证药物温度的完整性。变质问题并不是制药行业独有的，该行业仅占冷供应链市场的25%左右，而且在食品分销系统中也很普遍，为项目中开发的温度传感器的应用创造了额外的机会。这个i-Corps项目进一步开发了一种小型的时间-温度传感器，作为解决低温供应链中温度中断的一种手段。传感器技术的核心是新型的无电池量子动力学系统，它可以根据它们所处的温度条件来改变它们的状态。这些系统使用标准的硅制造技术制造，具有成本效益和可扩展性。与通常笨重和昂贵的现有温度监测方法相比，这些基于硅的设备提供了一种经济可行的方法，用于在个人水平上进行稳健和可量化的温度监测。使用电子监控解决方案的其他好处是，它们可以在一系列温度监控配置文件中使用，检测冻结损坏和振动，零停机时间，并执行连续记录，这可能有助于准确定位供应链中的故障，以供未来缓解。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

The broader impact/commercial potential of this I-Corps project is to assure the integrity of temperature regulated supply chains. In the pharmaceutical and food industries, temperature disruptions can cause loss of potency or safety, leading to adverse effects on public health and increased costs. For example, each of the current COVID-19 vaccines requires its own specific environmental conditions during transport, ranging from -70 C to 5 C. Excursions from this temperature range can lead to damaged vaccines that do not work as intended. Within the scope of vaccine distribution, significant numbers of vaccine vials may be discarded due to a lack of per-vial temperature monitoring information. Although COVID-19 has highlighted this problem, there is a global demand for small, inexpensive temperature sensors that could verify the integrity of pharmaceutical temperatures. The problem of spoilage is not unique to the pharmaceutical industry, which constitutes only around 25% of the cold supply chain market, but is also widespread in the food distribution systems, creating additional opportunities for the application of temperatures sensors developed in the project. This I-Corps project further develops a small, time-temperature sensor as a means of addressing temperature disruptions in the cold temperature supply chain. At the core of the sensor technology is novel battery-free quantum dynamical systems which change their state based on the temperature conditions to which they are exposed. These systems are manufactured using standard silicon fabrication techniques and are cost-effective and scalable. As compared to existing temperature monitoring methods which are often bulky and expensive, these silicon-based devices enable an economically-viable approach for robust and quantifiable temperature monitoring at the per-vial level. Additional benefits of using an electronic monitoring solution are that they can be used across a range of temperature monitoring profiles, detect freeze damage and vibrations, have zero-downtime, and perform continuous logging which may facilitate pinpointing faults in the supply chain for future mitigation.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.