Ireland is host to more than 350 medical technology companies, including 13 of the top 15 global med-tech companies, employing 25,000 people and exporting over €8 billion. IPIC is engaging with these companies to explore the integration of photonics into their future products to improve functionality, performance and value.
System scale is a critical parameter for health applications, such as wearable diagnostics and surgical instruments and therefore miniaturisation is an absolute requirement to achieve deployable solutions. The opportunities for IPIC technology to impact the health sector is huge – enabling the transition of diagnostics from highly specialised reference laboratories, to local point-of-care settings, and potentially to wearable devices.
In addition the technology can be integrated onto surgical instruments to guide surgeons during procedures to improve patient outcome. Our core research programme in this area is focused on the development of compact optical sensors that can be integrated with instruments, wearable devices, implants, smart-phones or optical fibres and the development of flexible microleds for optogenetics. Potential applications here include retinal, neuroscience and heart stimulation. Examples of where this technology can be applied to a number of biophotonics platforms include: In body O2 tissue sensing, microfludics, optical coherence tomography (OCT). Our researchers are also leveraging the emerging science of silicon photonics and hybrid and monolithic integration technologies to dramatically reduce device size.
Scientific challenges being addressed here include: Integration of discrete light sources onto silicon based biosensors & the integration of photonics and electronics onto compact microfluidic devices. This research has already resulted in the integration of optical fibres onto arterial guidewires and the first generation of miniaturised fluorescence sensing modules for blood and hormone analysis.
B. Snyder, B. Corbett and P O’Brien, “Hybrid Integration of the Wavelength-Tunable Laser With a Silicon Photonic Integrated Circuit”, Journal of Lightwave Technology Dec. 2013.