New biomedical nanotechnologies and smart defense devices are on display at the three-day Taiwan Innotech Expo at the Taipei World Trade Center in Taipei, which ends today.
Launched on Thursday, the expo was organized by the Ministry of Economic Affairs, the Ministry of Science and Technology, the National Development Council and other agencies. Nearly 500 vendors are taking part in the event.
Formerly known as the Taipei International Invention Show and Technomart, the expo is divided into three sections: future technology, innovative ideas and sustainability.
The biomedical and defensive technologies in the innovative ideas section have attracted the most attention.
Academia Sinica’s Research Center for Applied Sciences presented four technologies centered around biomedical chips, including a label-free detection system and a high throughput biomedical sensing platform developed by a team led by center deputy director Wei Pei-kuen (魏培坤).
Their nanochips can display the test results of certain fluids in a quantified range. For example, compared with a traditional pregnancy test, their chips can not only tell if a person is pregnant, but also show the concentrations of the tested fluid, which varies throughout pregnancy, center associate research scholar Lee Kuang-li (李光立) said.
Solutions for a number of purposes, such as food safety, water quality and disease prognosis, could be applied on their chips, he said, adding the chips could even be read by household scanners using a special technique they designed.
They spent nearly 14 years testing different materials, and this is the first time they are showcasing their research results at a trade show, he added.
National Applied Research Laboratories (NARL) presented its non-contact skin oxygen saturation imaging system, which allows a user to test the concentrations of oxygen and sugar in their blood.
The device takes an image of a person’s skin with two lights that have wavelengths of 660 and 890 nanometers.
Developed by NARL Instrument Technology Research Center research fellow Chang Han-chao (張漢釗) and associate researcher Tsai Hsin-yi (蔡心怡), the device could save people from experiencing the pain of being pierced by a needle when testing their blood sugar, center research assistant Rebacca Su (蘇芳琪) said.
The National Chungshan Institute of Science and Technology also displayed many applications that could serve both military and civilian purposes.
Its anti-counterfeiting identification system based on radio frequency identification allows wine retailers to prevent their bottles from being stolen and filled with a different wine.
The invention won the institute a gold prize at the Moscow International Salon of Inventions and Innovation Technologies in April.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
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