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

Since winning the 2014 Bradfield Award at the Australian Engineering Excellence Awards (AEEA) Sydney and the National 2014 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 Awards in 2014, John 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 John.

Due to the heightened profile that the AEEA Awards gave their project, John’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 John.

In 2015 John’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 John.

See where the Excellence Awards could take you!

To find out more about submitting a project into the AEEA Canberra Awards 2016, please visit excellenceawards.org.au/canberra. Entries close on 8 July 2016.


Photo:John Arkwright celebrating the AEEA Sydney 2014 success with his team.