PrintDr. Radislav Potyrailo, Principal Scientist-Micro & Optoelectronics at GE will be speaking at ID Tech Ex in Santa Clara this week and, we caught up with him to give us a snapshot of the past and future of sensors reliability. He will be speaking this week on wearable gas and physiological sensors and boosting their reliability.
Q&A With Dr. Radislav Potyrailo
Accumold: What reliability issues have prevented safety monitoring devices in the past?
Dr. Radislav Potyrailo: For example, canary birds as carbon monoxide (CO) detectors have been finally banned not long time ago– in 1989. They served well as reliable CO detectors for many decades. The main reliability issue of existing sensors is the false alarms over the time of their use due to (1) cross-sensitivity to other gases besides the gas of interest and (2) too large sensor response drift over time. These problems have not been eliminated yet.
Accumold: As designers create personal safety devices, especially for manufacturing facilities, where are OEMs going wrong?
Dr. Radislav Potyrailo: In my personal humble opinion, OEMs are not going “wrong”, they follow the cost-reduction path. OEMs use sensor methodologies invented in the last century and with these technologies, OEMs offer to solve contemporary needs. Our contemporary needs ask for new performance capabilities: differentiation between different gases, such as toxic and non-toxic and for the detection at much smaller gas concentrations that those early sensors.
Are there reliability issues for on-body safety wearables? Any future unintended consequences perhaps?
Dr. Radislav Potyrailo: Borrowing from answer 1 above, the main reliability issue of existing wearable sensors is the false alarms over the time of their use due to (1) cross-sensitivity to other gases besides the gas of interest and (2) too large sensor response drift over time. These problems have not been eliminated yet.
Attend Dr. Radislav Potyrailo’s Talk
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