Award Data

Low or narrow bridges are often hit by legal-sized commercial vehicles and oversize vehicles often strike regulation bridges. In both cases the accidents result in extensive property damage, possible personal injuries and even death, and increased traffic congestion. Past attempts to warn drivers of risks for bridge hits have failed due to inaccurate measurement, high rates of false alarms, or s ...

Job related injuries cost the railroads over $1 billion annually and from 2005 through 2008 30.3% of those injuries occurred in the rail yard. A majority of the accidents were attributed to slips, trips and falls from the worker slipping on ballast or tripping on other trackside objects. IEM is developing a Transportation Autonomous Device that may be configured to work autonomously, with a remote ...

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project proposes to develop a highly innovative, thermoelectric, microfluidic DNA sequencing method for mutation detection (e.g., SNPs) for applications in personalized medicine. The overall objective is to optimize operational parameters and microfluidic device design variables to overcome three factors that limit the accuracy of the sequenci ...

This Small Business Innovative Research SBIR Phase I project will use statistical analysis of historical medical records to create families of language models for each section of the traditional medical note and switch lexicons in and out of the automatic speech recognition (ASR) in real time based on the contextual position within the narrative note. Current speech recognition methods use a singl ...

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project aims to develop a commercial nanofluidic chip for the rapid identification of epigenetic marks on individual molecules. The instrument will dramatically improve existing methods of epigenomic analysis by removing two major limitations of the current technology. The proposed device will enable automated quantification of multiple epigen ...

This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project will develop a novel ion gate membrane with controlled pore size for redox flow battery. Redox flow battery is one of the most promising electric energy storage (EES) technologies. However, the cost of the state-of-the-art (SOA) membrane used in such battery has to come down dramatically in order to reach the overall system cost target for EE ...

This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project will develop a novel nano-scale process for synthesizing sulfur infused carbon composite cathode materials to produce high-energy density lithium-sulfur (Li-S) secondary batteries with a high rate of charge/discharge and extraordinarily long cycle life. Phase I research objectives include, (1) develop a process suitable for making large quant ...

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will allow children to improve their visual motor skills and handwriting through the use of a new, innovative haptic-based handwriting training technology. The proposal will address the following intellectual challenges: First, a low cost haptic workstation system which costs below $1,500 will be developed making haptics a practical sy ...

This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project will focus on the development and scale-up of a new process for fabricating probe tips for atomic force microscopy (AFM). In AFM, images of surfaces with atomic-scale resolution are created by rastering a probe across the surface. The probe itself consists of a tip (which interacts with the surface) and a body (which supports the tip and prov ...

This Small Business Technology Transfer (SBIR) Phase I project will utilize patent pending technology that allows direct dissolution and reconstitution of natural biopolymers to prepare chitin/alginate composite fibers with embedded additives for use in wound care products. The technology allows for solution blending and spinning of alginate and chitin (both known to speed wound healing, stimulate ...