Market study for Multi-channel Optical Dew & Humidity Sensor (MODHS)

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Humidity and dew monitoring is very critical for various application. According to a 2017 Frost and Sullivanmarket report (see ref. [3]) of proposal), "the global humidity and moisture sensors market size is expected tohit USD 1.90 billion by 2023." Current technologies are mostly electrical ones such as CMOS, MEMS, TFPT,and recently noncontact IR and RF-based technologies.The current electrical or optical humidity sensors have issues in terms of costs and technologies to providean economic environmental control service for detecting simultaneously in a large number of microclimatesystems (various locations). For the electrical humidity sensors, high-quality probes are rather expensive(200-300$/each). They are not fast enough to accurately track the ambient relative humidity (RH) when itrapidly changes, such as in various manufacturing processes, as well as considering their limitation for thenumber of the probes and distance from the control unit. For the optical technologies, their humidity probes arealso complicated, and often used an expensive detection system such as a spectrometer or interferometer.Our MHODS technology offers a cost-effective solution in comparison with current photonic basedapproaches. We realize this using a photonic technology, through the use of multiple optical fibers with eachhaving a surface plasmon resonance (SPR) sensor. Using the SPR probe and vapor condensation on a surface,we discovered a novel method to precisely sense moisture so that our transducer needs no moisture absorbentlayer, in contrast to previously introduced approaches. The MODHS can provide humidity and dew pointmonitoring service for a suite of microclimate systems in hard- to- access locations, industrials with hazardouschemicals, museums, archive rooms, libraries, laboratories, and etc.Also it enables us to use simple photoconductive cells or photodiodes for detection, instead to use expensivespectrometers. This is the reason why our photonic sensing platform will be inexpensive compared to othertechnologies, and easy to commercialize thus justifying the proposed market study.