SBIR Phase II: MicroLINKs: connecting the physical and digital worlds

这个小型企业研究创新(SBIR)第二阶段项目的更广泛的影响/商业潜力是减少当前对象与其数字历史之间的脱节所造成的经济、人力和环境成本。在人的层面上，考虑一下医院的使用案例：据估计，医疗差错每年导致超过9万人死亡。其中许多死亡可以追溯到信息流的中断：错误的药物给了病人，手术器械没有得到适当的消毒，等等。这些错误可以通过在送货点用来验证物体身份和状态的标签来防止。拟议的技术具有跨多个行业的应用潜力：在企业领域，公司正在序列化和增强现实(AR)方面投资数十亿美元，以完成从监控供应链到加快制造再到提高维护成本和可靠性的一切工作。小型企业创新研究(SBIR)第二阶段项目旨在解决尚未得到满足的需求，即提供一种连接物理和数字世界的技术，同时为特定市场提供所需的特征。建议的标签提供了一种新的解决方案，作为一种无处不在的、不引人注目的、具有成本效益的链接，将物理对象无缝且安全地绑定到其数字内容/历史，以及统一的数据存储/访问框架。技术里程碑是增加读取距离(从4厘米增加到16厘米)，以满足需要更长读取距离的应用的需要；以快速但可控的速度增加卷标签制造，并继续开发基于具有同轴光学的原型读取器的下一代读取器，其中读取长度可以在不改变光学元件或探测器的情况下进行调整。根据需要，阅读器可以针对特定的细分市场而不同，同时依赖相同的核心光学和电子传感技术。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 Small Business Research Innovation (SBIR) Phase II project is to reduce the economic, human, and environmental cost caused by the current disconnect between an object and its digital history. At the human level, consider hospital use cases: medical errors are estimated to kill upwards of 90,000 people annually. Many of these deaths can be traced to a disconnect in the flow of information: the wrong medication goes to a patient, a surgical instrument is not properly sanitized, etc. These errors could be prevented with a tag that is used to verify the identity and status of an object at point of delivery. The proposed technology has application potential across multiple industries: in the enterprise space, companies are investing billions in serialization and augmented reality (AR) to do everything from monitoring supply chains to speeding up manufacturing to improving the cost and reliability of maintenance. This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II project aims to address an unmet need to provide a technology that connects the physical and digital worlds while offering the needed characteristics for specific markets. The proposed tags provide a novel solution as a ubiquitous, unobtrusive, and cost-effective link that seamlessly and securely ties a physical object to its digital content/history, and a unified data storage/access framework. The technology milestones are to increase read distance (from 4 cm to 16 cm) to address the need to accommodate applications requiring longer read distances; to increase volume tag manufacturing at a rapid but controlled pace and to continue to develop next generation readers based on a prototype reader with co-axial optics, where the read length can be adjusted with no changes to the optics or detector. Based on need, the reader can be varied for specific market segments, while relying on the same core optical and electronic sensing technology.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.