ITRI Receives Four R&D 100 Awards for Advancements in Smart and Green Technologies

HSINCHU, TAIWAN--(Marketwired - Nov 16, 2015) - Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI), Taiwan's largest and one of the world's leading high-tech applied research institutions, received four 2015 R&D 100 Awards this year in Las Vegas November 13. ITRI's technologies were selected as winners for the most innovative products in the IT/Electrical and Mechanical Devices/Materials categories:

• Higher Sensitivity Tactile-film System for Wearable Orthosis (HSTS) (IT/Electrical Category), a thin film sensor technology, interprets the wearer's movements through physical contact between a wearable orthosis device and the wearer's skin. HSTS allows people with Essential Tremor to voluntarily control their movements, significantly improving their quality of life. With lower disturbance sensitivity and lower cost, HSTS is an improvement upon the current auxiliary wearable device technologies.
• Plasmon-Coupled Organic Light-Emitting Diode (PCOLED) (IT/Electrical Category) solves the problem of short lifespan of the OLED blue light component. It uses a single green light-emitting material to generate red, blue and green light without the use of color filters. In addition, PCOLED can recover energy lost to surface plasmon, effectively tripling the efficiency of blue emission. It can increase the lifespan of OLED displays and lamps up to 300,000 hours, or up to 20-fold. With successful pilot production and high compatibility with the existing OLED manufacturing process, PCOLED can revolutionize the OLED industry.
• PolyE (Mechanical Devices/Materials Category), a new cost-saving reverse osmosis technology for water desalination and filtration, is capable of lowering energy consumption by 30 to 80 percent. PolyE, the world's first commercially viable nanofibrous thin film composite membrane, can desalinate water on a utility scale at a much lower hydraulic pressure than conventional methods and at a lower cost, without compromising the level of filtration.
• Fluid-Driven Emergency Lighting (Mechanical Devices/Materials Category), a high-illumination LED light driven by hydropower, uses water from firefighters' water hose nozzles and also from water sprinklers in buildings. With water powering the light mechanism and providing improved visibility in fire conditions, this technology can improve safety during fires and give firefighters enhanced life-saving capabilities.

"To keep on winning on a regular basis every year just shows the dedication ITRI has to promoting technology and innovation. It's just encouraging for everybody to see that ITRI is continuing that sort of dedication, investment in R&D, and creativeness," said Tim Studt, Editorial Director of R&D Magazine. "ITRI has the strength in covering a wide range of industrial technologies and trying to make products that are commercially available," he added.