The Managing Directors of two Health@InnoHK and AIR@InnoHK projects at the Faculty of Engineering, Professor Anderson Shum and Professor Norman C. Tien gave the Inaugural Tech Talk with the theme “Digitization” and introduced insightful research projects and their future development plan.
A Ceremony was held on December 28 (Tuesday) to mark the opening of the Tam Wing Fan Innovation Wing Two (Innovation Wing Two), an important new facility under the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Hong Kong (HKU).
Garment production is a laborious process that relies primarily on manual operations. Smart robots are set to play a vital role in future automations and assist human workers with repetitive and/or high-risk tasks. To achieve interactive human-robot collaborations, robots need to learn and understand how humans work and thus a cost-effective means of digitising manual operations is of the essence. In this project, we aim at developing an innovative approach to high-fidelity, real-time full-body motion capture for garment workers without using specialty cameras.
A lot of diseases can be transmitted via airborne agents, such as viruses spreading through droplets. The concentrations of these airborne agents are usually too low in the environment and it has created difficulties for the current detection instruments available in the market. We aim to fill this gap by developing new technologies to enhance detection and diagnostics of airborne viruses.
This project aims to develop a set of technologies to achieve convenient-to-use mobility support for the elderly. Our walker has three fundamental functionalities that do not exist or not well supported by (smart) walkers in the market: smart walking assistance; falling prevention and support; autonomous mobility.
More than 30% of the population in Hong Kong will have an age of 65 or more by 2037. It is important to encourage more helpers, who can be elders themselves, to help others voluntarily. This will not only alleviate the shortage of helpers required for elderly care services, but also enables “healthy ageing” and establishes a “mutual-help” culture.
Current surface disinfection methods include spraying chemicals or using UV light. However, it is difficult to directly spray liquid chemicals on surfaces due to the threat of negative environmental impacts and possible damage and contamination to various surfaces such as books and food packages. Currently, UV based disinfection lights are either wall mounted or operate on mobile bases. Moreover, they are often positioned metres away from surfaces that require disinfection.
The housing shortage is a well-recognized challenge in Hong Kong. To meet the huge and growing needs, productivity and on-time delivery facilitated by modern building technology and decision support platforms in housing projects are crucial. Besides, e-commerce has grown very fast recently. Professor Huang’s team developed cyber-physical systems including both hardware and software solutions for construction and e-commerce logistics industries.
Human skin can sense subtle changes of both normal and shear forces as well as perceive stimulus with finer resolution than the average spacing between mechanoreceptors. By contrast, existing tactile sensors for robotic applications are inferior, lacking both accurate force decoupling and proper spatial resolution. This project aims at developing skin-alike soft tactile sensors based on principles of magnetic fields.
Low-grade heat, which is abundantly available in the environment and even in human body, is always wasted without use. Direct Thermal Charging Cell (DTCC) is invented for efficient heat-to-electricity conversion yielding a conversion efficiency over 5%, which surpasses all existing thermo-electrochemical and thermo-electric systems in low-grade heat regime.