Peter de Boves Harrington, Director of the Center for Intelligent Chemical Instrumentation Ohio University, delivers a speech at Track C World Forum on Intelligent Manufacturing Industry of the 2nd WORLD EMERGING INDUSTRIES SUMMIT (WEIS 2013)

Outline of the speech:

•       Smarter Products Based on Chemical Sensing

•       Peter de B. Harrington, PhD

•       OHIO University, Center for Intelligent Chemical Instrumentation

•       Short Definition of Terms

•       Forensics is an application area of science applied to solving legal problems.

•       Proteomics is the study of protein profiles and networks and can be applied to medicine and curing disease.

•       Chemometrics is the study of maximizing the information gained from making chemical measurements.

•       Embedded and automated chemometric methods are required for smart instruments and chemical sensors.

•       The Future is Now

•       Advances in micro-machined electronics and instruments affords the opportunity for low-cost disposable chemical sensors.

•       Sensors can be embedded into many household and industrial products to improve the quality of life and ensure health and safety.

•       Chemical Sensing

•       Just as we have 5 senses; hearing, sight, smell, taste, touch

•       Analytical instruments can provide chemical profiles

•       Profiles are lists of chemicals and their amounts

–      Air we breathe

–      Food we eat

–      Health of our bodies

•       Smart Undergarments

•       Smart Sensors

These instruments have built in knowledge so anyone can use them.

Smart Buildings

•       Healthy People

•       The use of chemical instruments can be used to profile

–      Proteins in bodily fluids

–      Small molecules in breathe, saliva, urine

•       These chemical profiles can be used to detect diseases such as cancer

•       Detect the presence of toxins or drugs

•       Monitor overall health such as blood sugar for diabetics

•       Authentication is Important for Food Safety

•       Authentication is the act of validating the identity of a material usually with respect to the product label or description

–      Composition

–      Source                              $3,400,000

–      Purity

–      Age

•       Important for detection of adulteration, spoilage, contamination, and mislabeling

•       Safe Foods

•       In a study organized by the US Pharmacopeia 117 skim milk samples and 702 skim milk samples that were adulterated with vegetable proteins were profiled using MALDI-MS.  

•       The level of adulteration ranged from 5% to 0.1%.

•       The adulterated samples could be detected with 100% accuracy from the unadulterated samples.

•       These methodologies could enable producers to protect their products and provide consumer assurance.

•       Conclusion

•       Smart chemical sensors can improve our quality of life

•       Chemometrics provides the tools to make the sensors smart by providing algorithms that convert data to  information.

•       These algorithms are embedded, automated, and invisible to the users.

•       Several tools for the automated processing of chemical profiles into information streams have been developed.

–      Fuzzy Rule-building Expert Systems (FuRES), Harrington, 1991.

–      Fuzzy Optimal Associative Memories (FOAM), Harrington, 1996.

–      Principal Component Orthogonal Signal Correction (PC-OSC), Harrington, 2009.