Open Innovation challenges on Innoget

David Rafols is the CEO and co-founder of Innoget with a wealth of experience on innovation management and R&D projects. Prior to founding Innoget, he was a technology sourcing manager at CIDEM, an Innovation Agency within the Catalonia local government, Barcelona, Spain. David has also worked for several food industry companies, such as Chupa Chups S.A. (technical manager) and Danone S.A. (R&D engineer). He has a degree in Biology and an MBA for the University of Barcelona. Some challenges :
A Hungarian technology transfer agency is looking for a manufacturer of the named medical instrument that is equipped with an image recording device and uses illumination with different wavelength.The instrument is capable of recording skin lesions, and of helping the uses in the diagnosing process. The system consists of two parts. These are the scanning device, and the docking station.

The scanning device contains an image recording device (camera or photodevice), which is used to take pictures of the inspected skin surface. It also contains LED-s with different wavelength, to illuminate the surface (an additional option is to attach polarizing filters). To get the appropriate sized images, a custom parameterized lens is built into the device.

The recorded image is automatically transferred to an external system (PC or PDA). The communication is made via a wired (USB, ETHERNET) and/or wireless (WiFi) channel. 

The internal electronics are the image recording device (already available), the LED circle, and a controlling circuit (custom circuit). This controls the LED-s, switches the system on or off and triggers the camera. All the circuits are made of SMD components. The case has an ergonomic design. There is one push button and a LED indicator on it. With these two things the user can easily operate the instrument. The other part, the docking station has a charging circuit inside, hence if we do not use the scanning device, the dock charges it continuously (with custom circuit). The device operates with a rechargeable accumulator. Built-in LCD hardware is an extra option for a quick diagnosis.

During the design phase, the main objective was, to design it clearly, in order to assist the manufacturing stage. All the custom built components were designed with CAD softwares. If a component is already available, then obtainability, and ease of inclusion into the system were taken into account. In the design stage, facilitating the manufacturing process is also very important. During the design stage a range of common standards were incorporated.  

Input documents and files for manufacturing:

The company can provide AutoCAD 2010 (.dwg) design files for case and docking station design, Eagle 5.7.0 schematics and layout design files for custom electronics. The program codes for PIC MCU are written in the latest Microchip MPLAB. We can provide the project files and the .c, .asm source codes. They will provide detailed description of necessary, already available components (for example image recording device).