Technology Innovation Awards Winners of 2009

Many things got easier this year. The Abbott Laboratories’ Ibis Biosciences unit developed the Ibis T5000 sensor which helped identify the first two cases of the H1N1 swine flu in the US and topped the charts this year with a gold award.

In the silver award, there is an artificial hand which is made by Touch Bionics Inc which is more advanced because it has bendable fingers, and a rotating thumb. This uses sophisticated motors and computer controls to grip objects and move in ways traditional hands can’t. It will be more like a real hand.

The Bronze award went to an Indian telecommunications company called Vihaan Networks ltd also known as VNL which made a solar powered base station to bring cell phone access to remote rural villages. It can be made quickly and can be assembled by unskilled workers.

Now, the top in computing is  Organic Motion based in New York and they made a motion capture system which does not need bodysuits or markers. It uses software which makes a digital clone of people being filmed. Fourteen video cameras capture images simultaneously and send them to a standard computer with a high end programmable graphics card which is cheaper than the equipment used in movie special effects shop.

The top in consumer electronics are  flexible speakers by the Taiwan Industrial Technology Research Institute, or the ITRI and it will be used in phones, car sound systems, and public service announcements in train stations or ads in shopping malls.