A diverse crowd of developers and deployers of smart sensors attended the NSW Smart Sensing Network’s (NSSN) Sensing Industry Connect event at UNSW last week.

The quarterly event attracts a wide variety of entrepreneurs, manufacturers, designers and researchers of smart sensing and offers a chance to connect and share opportunities.

Pro Vice-Chancellor (Industry & Innovation) at UNSW, Professor Stephen Rodda described the NSSN’s point of difference to the audience as its ability to bring all stakeholders together in a collaboration.
He said the network had the “great breadth to go into so many industry sectors and have application and also value."

NSSN Co-Director Julien Epps described the network as an effective model that has helped bring communities and project partners together.

"The NSSN is here to support these kinds of (innovative) partnerships, to find funding and to make things happen. To bring people together to solve big problems.”

Co-CEO and Software Engineering Manager at Genesys Electronics Design (Genesys), George Bou-Rizk, described the “time, quality, cost dilemma” of electronics design to the audience.

Genesys is a product design consultancy with a more than 30-year history of preparing innovative products for commercialisation.

Mr Bou-Rizk said the consultancy has been working with universities increasingly in recent years.

He said like start-ups, researchers often want the best possible device, very quickly and cheaply.

“But if you have (a device produced) fast and cheap, you sacrifice quality. High quality and cheap, you’re going to wait a long time. And fast and high quality, well you’d better be prepared to pay for it.”

Some of the guests at the Sensing Industry Connect event at UNSW.

He said the dilemma set a barrier to entry for a lot of innovators and universities.

“We realised that what universities and university researchers need to focus on is the innovative aspect of their project, not spend 80 percent of the resources focusing on the foundational baseline features that you just have to do to get a product onto the market, or even functional.”

Mr Bou-Rizk described the Genesys solution to the time-cost-quality dilemma as the consultancy’s wireless sensor platform.

He said the platform makes it faster and cheaper to prepare an innovative project for market, while still maintaining high quality.

The platform consisting of a baseboard and a sensor board was fully developed under medical device design controls, is translatable to each industry, and comes with a customisable mobile app or tablet.

Genesys is currently collaborating with a UNSW chemical engineering team on the development of a nanotubes-based gas sensor for detecting multiple gases.
The consultancy is also working on sensor related projects with the Tyree IHealthE Institute at UNSW and the ARC Research Hub for Connected Sensors for Health.

NSSN will be partnering with Genesys Electronics Design to revive its educational seminar series for researchers seeking to commercialise sensing devices. The first seminar will take place at UNSW in April, with other seminars across NSSN member universities rolling out across 2024.

Sensing Industry Connect hears benefits of wireless sensing platform for innovators