K-Rising Technology 1

KAUTM(Korea Association of University Technology Transfer Management), KIPA(Korea Invention Promotion Association), and DeltaTech-Korea are introducing Korea’s Rising Technologies.

KAUTM is a network organization made up of technology licensing offices of universities that collaborate and interact through the network. We are conducting promoting the commercialization of technologies of member universities through seminars, marketing events, and knowledge committees.

KIPA has boosted the value and competitiveness of Korea’s intellectual property for the last 40 years as the nation’s first and leading institution of its kind.

DTK is a technology-based company that specializes in innovation management, technology transfer, and business acceleration program.

Our Technology Offers

Leaching Solution for Nutrient Extraction from Soil

This technology offers a method to manufacture leaching solutions, which can be used for leaching tests to determine the inorganic contents in soil.

The precise adjustment of pH in the soil is challenging, as the pH of the soil can change over time, resulting in unstable and inaccurate results during analysis. Moreover, when the pH of leaching solutions has changed, the change cannot be easily identified—with the naked eye—leading to the use of denatured leaching solutions and inaccurate analyses. Consequently, the wrong fertilisers could be prescribed, which will negatively impact plant growth.

This technology offers method to manufacture a leaching solution, where the pH does not change even during long-term storage, and the pH change, if any, can be easily determined with the naked eye through colour change. Thereby enabling accurate soil analyses and proper fertilizer prescription ideal for plant growth. Aside from the manufacturing process, the company will also transfer knowledge on analysing soil using the leaching solution.

Using Natural Products to Improve Skin Microflora for Atopic Dermatitis

The skin microbiome is an important factor in determining skin health status. However, to date, there have been limited ways to improve the skin microbiome for healthy skin. The company has developed a technology to improve the distribution of the skin microbial flora. Using natural products comprised of plant extracts, the technology allows microflora distribution that is beneficial to skin health.

Skin microflora composition of patients with atopic dermatitis (AD) is different to that in healthy individuals. Using the technology in a clinical test on 21 subjects, the results showed a reduction of Staphylococcus aureus, a key colonizing bacterium on skin of AD patients, by an average of 29%, and Cutibacterium acnes, an acne bacterium, by an average of 23%. Improving the distribution of these microorganisms brings about several benefits including ameliorated damaged skin barrier, relieved primary irritation of sensitive skin, delayed aging, and improved skin pigment uniformity. Nearly half of the AD patients experienced effects of treating their symptoms, with the remaining having improvements in symptom relief. The technology allows for other aspects of skin health regeneration such as improved moisture retention for up to 72 hours, improved skin complexion, and reduced body odor.

Currently, there are existing offerings for skin microbiome. However, the majority has presented limited outcomes of skin microbiome improvements. Unlike these existing solutions, the plant-based technology allows redistribution of skin microflora, which is key to treat and manage atopic dermatitis.

EYAS (EYE-EAR-ATTENTION SYSTEM)

The company has developed the world’s first attention recovery training system, incorporating visual tracking and sound interlocking technology for people with attention or cognitive impairment, or those at risk for cognitive decline. Our technology can also be effective on critically ill patients who cannot use their body (hands, feet, etc.).

While other conventional attention training products use just a keyboard or touchpad, our technology provides maximized training effects not only for general patients but also for critically ill patients by using an eye tracker(visual) and a speaker(hearing).

The target users for our technology are patients with cognitive disorders with reduced attention, patients with high risk of cognitive decline, children with ADHD and anyone looking to increase their concentration.

We are seeking companies to license this product or co-develop this product for other applications.

Bio pH Regulation and Bio Microelectric Current Activation Using Somatid Mineral Graphene Balls

Healthy individuals have their bioelectricity within the negative range. Human cells work normally when their bioelectricity is at -25mV. When the body’s bioelectricity shifts to positive electron range (e.g. +30mV), diseases may develop. Another health metric is bio pH. Our cells are healthy when the pH of our blood and body fluids is weakly alkaline (pH 7.35-7.45). Acidification of our body fluids can contribute to illnesses. There are four common phenotypes stemming from human diseases, including accumulation of toxins in the body, low metabolic activities (blood circulation issues), acidification of blood and body fluids, and positronization of bio microelectricity (discharge under -25mV). This technology aims to improve general health and wellness by managing these phenotypes of diseases.

The technology is designed for bio pH regulation and bio microelectric current activation of the human body using Somatid Mineral Graphene balls and warm alkaline water treatment. Somatid Mineral Graphene balls comprises two components: highly concentrated mineral base Somatid and graphene. Somatid contains seven types of minerals that naturally emit negative electrons, and high-density near-infrared and far-infrared rays. Somatids from plants and seaweed have high concentrations of vital nutrients and vitamins. Combining somatids with graphene allows for excellent conductivity for bio microelectric currents activation and bio pH (acidity) regulation in the human body.

The technology aims to target patients as well as the general population for improving their health and wellness. The technology provider is seeking both licensing and collaboration opportunities with medical or biotechnology organizations who have interests in general wellbeing technologies.

Generating Sterile Male Insects Using Electron Beam Irradiation for Crop Pest Control

Fruit flies can cause extensive damage to farmers’ crops. Adult female fruit flies lay eggs in the flesh of ripening and ripe fruits. These eggs later hatch and evolve into larvae which feed from the inside of the fruits and cause these fruits to rot and fall onto the ground.

With fruit fly attacks resulting in heavy losses faced by farmers, efforts have been implemented to control the fruit fly population. A method is sterile insect release technique (SIT), which involves sterilizing males by irradiation and releasing them outdoor for mating with wild females to derive unfertilized eggs. However, the irradiation method presents disadvantages of decreased mating ability of sterile males, and shortened life span of these males, which reduces the efficiency of SIT in controlling fruit fly population.

The technology presents a sterile male generation method using electron beam radiation. Electron beam radiation produces infertile males with comparable mating ability without impacting on their life span. Furthermore, the technology presents another advantage of reducing the density of infertile males required for fruit fly population control. Therefore, the current infertile male fly generation method can be implemented for SIT programs to control fruit fly population.

The technology provider is seeking collaboration with partners in the crop and pest industries for co-development, and testing and evaluation of the technology.

Natural Functional Material Agent For Enhancing Body Health as a Novel Food

Naturally-derived functional materials are increasingly used in foods as food additives and functional ingredients. With the technology improvement in obtaining functional ingredients, the health benefits of food product developed has been improving as well. Food with such functional ingredients is able to help consumers address problems such as metabolic syndrome and the “3 Highs” (3H Care: Hypertension, Hyperglycemia and High Cholesterol) and so on.

Despite the discovery of so many functional raw materials in nature, we are not able to obtain the benefits from the food efficiently. The need for health foods with functional ingredients has led to consumer behavior change. Demand has increase. As a result, this consumer-driven demand stimulated the creation of this technology.

A start-up has developed this naturally-derived functional material, which when added during food production and together with the raw materials, it can enhance the health benefits expected. This proprietary complete-functional ingredient raw materials platform has entered South Korea food market since 2021.

In addition, this technology has shown a steady rise in Japan, Canada and around the world. This start-up supports the process of developing, screening of functional raw material variants to complete the creation of the complete functional ingredient in the food and hence speed up problem-solving across a wide range of applications.

This technology is available for licensing. Seeking partnerships with industry players via technology transfer, R&D collaboration or co-development.

Identifying People Better with Neural Network

Person re-identification (person re-ID) systems can find an individual in pictures of footage taken by different security cameras. This becomes important when there is a lack of overlap between security cameras. Convolution neural networks (CNNs) offer a new approach for automated person re-ID. However, most existing CNN-based person re-ID methods can only identify global features (find a match for the entire initial picture, which includes clothing etc.). This makes them less effective than models, such as the proposed one, that can identify local features.

The proposed Siamese person re-ID model combines two types of approaches identification-based (searching all the persons in a data set and identifying which person is the same as the query) and verification-based (determining if two given persons are the same person). Moreover, it emphasizes relevant features for matching while suppressing less important ones (such as clothing). This is done by using a multi-loss function that constrains both classification error (reduces false positives and false negatives) and the class distance (ensures similar features are grouped together and different features are grouped separately).

In addition, unlike other models that use local features, this model does not need a large volume of training data. Thus, this novel model outperforms a number of state-of-the-art approaches, including both conventional and deep network-based models.

Purifying Indoor Air Pollution Without Electrical Power

The indoor environment threatens human health with a variety of harmful substances coming from carpets, furniture, pets, and even electronic devices, as well as from simple building materials. This is even more dangerous for children, elderly, and patients with relatively weak immune systems.

The technology owner is trying to solve the problem of indoor pollution in the greenest way through eco-friendly building materials that can perform several functions in a passive manner such as humidity control, purifying harmful substances, and removal of odor, offering pleasant air in the indoor space.

As customised products, they can be easily installed without other engineers and attach to all types of walls (wood, bricks, cement, etc.). The technology owner seeks to further improve the completeness of the product through technical exchange with IoT companies and paint or building material developers with complementary technologies.