Putting existing ideas to best use

The Conference Centre is hosting a display of technologies adapted to potent new uses

IF YOU’RE a dab hand in the kitchen, you’ll know that when you combine familiar ingredients in a new way, it can result in a dish with brand new appeal. Similarly, by putting existing technologies together cleverly, you can sometimes create a better way of doing things.

Such technological alchemy lies behind several projects that are to get a public airing on Monday at the Big Ideas showcase, which is being run by Enterprise Ireland at the Convention Centre Dublin.

One of the technologies to be pitched at the event is Engram, which looks to improve early-stage testing of drugs to combat brain conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease.

“The big problem at the moment is that the number of drugs that are coming to market for neurological conditions has been falling year on year,” explains Shane O’Mara, professor of experimental brain research at Trinity College Dublin.

“But the world is ageing very quickly and the numbers of people who are going to develop dementia are going to rise dramatically over the next 10 or 20 years.”

Engram looks to measure brain responses in early drug trials quickly, in order to better understand whether compounds that are being proposed for conditions like Alzheimer’s disease are working, he explains.

“We have been combining EEG measurements, which is the electrical activity in the brain, along with the functional brain imaging measurements and cognitive tests, all in the one person simultaneously and under medical supervision,” he says. “The typical timeline for most experimental medical studies of that type would have been three months, but we have been able to show that you can get a signal out as early as six hours after first drug administration in a human. So we are able to accelerate the discovery process dramatically.”

Getting rapid answers from these small-scale studies – which are carried out after the compounds have already gone through the toxicology tests – could help inform decisions about whether the larger-scale trials should then proceed, says Prof O’Mara.

“If a drug isn’t going to work you don’t want to put it into a big clinical trial that is going to cost you hundreds of millions of euro.”

So who are the potential customers for such a service? Large pharmaceutical companies that are looking to externalise RD programmes and smaller companies that may have molecules to test but not the capacity to test them, according to O’Mara.

Another approach that combines existing technologies to address a health problem is Vitfiz, which makes it easier to do your exercises at home between physio visits.

This is because most of us don’t comply with the prescribed exercises, says Pat Golden, who has come in as a business adviser on the project.

“There are problems with motivation and remembering how to do the exercises properly,” he says. “People don’t have the right posture, they don’t move the limb or the area of focus in the right direction and they end up doing it wrongly.”

The idea behind Vitfiz is to harness sensor technology and feedback to get patients moving and in the right way, he explains.

“The same principle is used in gaming technology like the Wii or the Kinect – except with this solution the measurement of performance and feedback is focused.”

Large systems already exist to help patients in rehabilitation hospitals but they are not cost-effective in an outpatient context, he adds.

So what does Vitfiz do? In the clinic, the physio uses a sensor to take a template of you doing the exercise, then when you go home you can use the accelerometer on your phone as the sensor to track your progress – even relaying it on to a screen to help keep you engaged, explains Golden.

“The idea behind this is that it’s general, it doesn’t matter if it’s the knee, hip, arm, wrist – you can focus the exercises on it.”

The technology, which was developed at the Science Foundation Ireland-funded Clarity Centre for Sensor Technologies, has been tested on about 20 patients and the feedback has been positive, says Golden.

So what happens now? “The market is really outside Ireland, so we have been talking to a number of clinics here and in the US,” he says.

“The next step is to get a more market-robust product and that requires an investment.”

Another technology to be pitched to the audience on Monday is Lingle, an online tool to help language teachers gather interesting and relevant content for their classes.

“For those who have ever attempted to learn a language, you might ask the question, ‘why is the content so monumentally boring?’ – there are reasons behind that,” says chief executive and co-founder Ian Butler.

“It takes a lot of effort for any teacher to put together material on a constant basis that is recent and relevant and interesting for the class – but Lingle takes a huge amount of that time and effort away.”

The approach lets teachers carry out filtered searches for content from a range of news sources – currently in English but the plan is to expand to other languages too, according to Butler – and quickly retrieve and create lessons from articles that are suited to the class level and that contain specified examples of grammar and vocabulary.

And again, it is about lining up the right technologies and skills, he explains: “A lot of the technology has been available discretely, but it’s getting that right combination of machine-learning experience, computational linguistics and web technology, along with the right copyright agreements with the right providers and the right amount of content out there.”

By reducing the searching process down to minutes instead of hours, Butler believes that the technology – which was developed through Dublin Institute of Technology and the National Digital Research Centre – offers plenty of opportunities.

“We can change the nature of language learning by making it a lot more interesting for people and making it easier for people to get involved in it,” he says.

The Enterprise Ireland Big Ideas Showcase 2011 will see 18 technologies presented on stage and several more in a poster exhibition.

The event takes place this Monday at the Convention Centre Dublin