Continued success after the AEEA Awards: Fibre Optic Manometry Thursday, 19 May 2016

Since winning the Australian Engineering Excellence Awards (AEEA) 2014 National Sir William Hudson Award, Prof John Arkwright PhD MIEAust and his team have continued to develop their fibre optic technology for use in the gastrointestinal tract. With the development of this revolutionary technology, it has established a global presence and the devices are now in regular use across Australia, New Zealand, and Europe.

Since entering the AEEA in 2014, Prof Arkwtight shares the advancements their project ‘Fibre Optic Manometry – A 21st Century Approach to In-Vivo Diagnostics’ has made.

“Our publications on the results of clinical trials in the human colon continue to attract interest from the global gastrointestinal community and our results are beginning to redefine our understanding of how this complex organ works. Our more recent work has started to focus on other regions of the body and our transducer design is proving to be highly versatile. With small modifications to the original design, we are now running trials to establish baseline measurements in the human small bowel and efficacy for diagnosis of obstructive sleep apneoa, urodynamics, obstetrics, and lower limb compression therapy,” said Prof Arkwright.

Due to the heightened profile that the AEEA gave their project, Prof Arkwright's team have been receiving a growing number of enquiries about new applications outside of the medical field and they have recently been successful in winning grants to develop sensors to study pressure dynamics in long distance water pipes and in hydraulic pipeline infrastructure.

One of the teams’ latest successes was published in a recent report on optical fibre technologies in South Australia, commissioned by the South Australia State Government. “Our transducer design and packaging were singled out for particular praise by a team of global photonics experts who emphasized that our ‘packaging approach solves the very difficult problem of athermal packaging’; and that our technology will ‘allow advanced pressure and shape sensing critical in both medical and industrial applications’,” said Prof Arkwright.

In 2015 Prof Arkwright's team established a spin-off company out of Flinders University, Arkwright Technologies Pty Ltd, to develop their patented designs and they are already making sales and establishing a name for themselves as providers of innovative application specific solutions for both medical and industrial applications. They have attracted the interest of a Melbourne based multinational instrument company and are now actively seeking investment to ramp up the company and to gain Regulatory Approval for medical applications across the globe.

“The future of optical fibre sensing for medical applications is looking bright!” said Prof Arkwright.

Enter the 2016 Australian Engineering Excellence Awards

Enter the Australian Engineering Excellence Awards (AEEA) Tasmania 2016 and showcase your organisations' project to industry, clients, and the community. Recipients of the AEEA Tasmina Awards 2016 are eligible for entry into the AEEA National Awards 2016.

To find out more about submitting an entry, please visit excellenceawards.org.au/tasmania