Small Business Collaboration

ORCATECH is uniquely poised to collaborate with small businesses to accelerate the development of new medical technology. ORCATECH's extensive product and algorithm testing resources can provide rich validation and feedback to external engineers.

SBIR and STTR funding for collaboration

Regular federal funding for small business collaboration is available through the National Institutes of Healh (NIH) via the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) funding opportunities.

More information on these sources is available here

To inquire about small business collaboration, please contact Judith Kornfeld at kornfeld@ohsu.edu 

Previously awarded collaborative projects

Principal Investigator: Fay Horak, Ph.D.

Our long-term goal is to develop and commercialize a unique system to measure mobility (gait and dynamic balance) using wearable sensors throughout the day. Our OHSU/PSU start-up company, APDM, is developing systems to allow clinicians and clinical researchers to monitor mobility and clinical motor symptoms using their core technology, 'Opal' movement monitors. We already have established the value of automatically characterizing gait and prescribed 180-degree turns in clinical environments during a Get Up and Go task with our ITUG application. We now want to add a new product that takes mobility monitoring into the home and community. 

Principal Investigator: Don Young, TI Works, Inc.

Studies suggest that 11 percent of elderly hospital admissions and 24 percent of nursing home admissions are due to medication non-adherence. Our goal is to develop an image enabled intervention system whereby a remote informal caregiver (e.g., a family member) can collaborate with a senior citizen living at home to improve medication adherence. A significant innovation is changing the self-medication process model into a real time collaborative one.

Principal Investigator: Eric Wan, Ph.D., STTR Phase 1 and Phase 2 to EmbedRF

A critical component of remote health care monitoring is physically tracking the location of the patient within a living environment and assessing the patient's mobility. Research has shown that mobility, which includes gait characteristics, is integrally related to patient health and changes in mobility can be an indicator of cognitive and/or physical decline. Positional tracking and mobility information can be further used to estimate clinically relevant activities of daily living, which are also useful in assessing patient health. The objective of this STTR is to research and develop a Position Tracking and Mobility Assessment System called MobileRF targeted specifically for elderly patients within their home environment. This patented system will be low-cost, accurate, unobtrusive, and simple to install.

Principal Investigators: Eric Wan, Ph.D., Peter G. Jacobs, Ph.D., Jeffrey Kaye, MD awarded to EmbedRF from the Alzheimer's Assoc

The objective of this grant is to research and develop a device-free position tracking and mobility assessment system (MobileRF) targeted specifically for monitoring patients with mild cognitive impairment / Alzheimer’s Disease within their home environment.