Award Data

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): As the well known baby boomer generation surges toward retirement age, the issue becomes more significant each day of how this generation of 78 million seniors will be able to remain as independent as possible while increasingly burdened by the onset of multiple, chronic, medical conditions and a decline in cognitive abilities. Concurrent with the dramatic incr ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Project Summary/Abstract This project will improve the energy efficiency of home oxygen concentrators for patients on long-term oxygen therapy (LTOT) and save energy costs for the patients. The number of patients on LTOT is estimated to be 1.2 million. The cost of electricity can vary from one region, to another so it is difficult to determine the exact monthly ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Advanced Medical Electronics Corporation (AME) proposes to develop a smartphone-based adaptive audiovisual array that enables hearing aid users to converse with multiple speakers in reverberant environments with significant speech babble noise where their hearing aids do not function well. The array will consist of a smartphone, a smartphone accessory, and a sm ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): It is difficult for people who are blind or have low vision to recognize people in a variety of social interactions. Sole reliance on voice recognition may be difficult in some circumstances, and impossible in other circumstances, e.g., people within a group who do not speak. The inability to identify people during group meetings is a disadvantage for blind peo ...

Biomass is a renewable resource with high potential to achieve cost effective, reliable, and environmentally friendly energy to the American consumer, but yet is still deemed inefficient. First, current methodologies only allow conversion of cellulosic materials into biofuel, leaving energy-rich hemicellulosic material unutilized. Second, even though carbohydrate conversion is the focus of biomass ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): In chronic wounds, numerous factors contribute to the diminished healing. Wound healing constituents, including heparan sulfate proteoglycans and numerous growth factors, are essential to normal skin wound healing. Several key growth factors such as FGF, VEGF, and PDGF require heparan sulfate-like polymers as co- receptors or co-activators for growth factor act ...

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project seeks to build a system called CyberCollage as a cyberlearning tool to support computational thinking in STEM education at the middle school level. CyberCollage will enable the collective programming of educational games and computational science simulations through a social media approach that uniquely combines real-time synchronous ...

This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project will establish the feasibility of producing a flexible, highly transparent polyimide film that is thermally stable, has a high glass transition, displays near zero birefringence and a low coefficient of thermal expansion (CTE). This material is designed for use as a flexible flat panel display substrate. No available material displays all of ...

This SBIR project will develop a novel reactor design for UV/TiO2 photocatalysis. Specifically, the degradation of MTBE will be investigated and the project will then look at byproduct formation. Additionally, optimizing the system by adding oxygen as an electron acceptor and H2O2 as an alternative method for degrading MTBE will be explored. The broader/commercial impact of this project will be ...

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): An estimated 30% of chronic stroke patients with motor disabilities of the limbs are plegic in the hand or the foot - that is, they cannot move the hand or foot. While some plegic stroke patients have completely paralyzed muscles, without the ability to activate even minimally the plegic muscles ( profound plegia ), other plegic stroke patients are capable of p ...