Cyberfab develops products and services for wireless physiological and field data management. We provide sensors and services to speed up decision making processes based on quantitative information for anytime anywhere access to expertise. Our vision is to transform mobile devices (phones, Internet tablets) into real time monitoring and alerting assistants.

The company was started early 2001 to actually connect semiconductor manufacturing to the Internet.

It quickly became obvious that each equipment manufacturer vendor (and subsystem such as vacuum pumps, wafer handling robot etc…) had a proprietary communication protocol, so it turned out to be too complex to have a “uniform way” to extract production equipment information such a s temperatures, flows, pressures etc…

This was our first wake-up call in terms of the importance of “interoperability”. We worked then on providing mobility to people working in wafer fabrication plants (or fabs) and developed BlueFab which is currently used by ST Microelectronics in Crolles.

This solution allows data collection and close to real time alerting for technicians that collect information on subsystems (pumps, generators, chillers, gas recycling cabinets etc….).

Users can set thresholds for different values and by watching trends can be warned of machine degradation prior to actual component failure which would result in product loss.

Over 900 systems are currently monitored and we recently added the capability of taking images with mobile devices, add them to a database, generate reports and provide access to these reports on the company’s intranet.

BlueFab could of course be used in other industries needing real time alerts, such as petrochemical plants.

In 2003 we developed a mobile reader for lateral flow immunoassays. Using a CMOS camera and a PDA we take images of these tests (which are like pregnancy tests where lines appear due to the presence (or absence) of a substance), analyze the images, provide the results to the users and transmit them to a distant server.

We are looking into using the same product/architecture and combine it with GPS information to track asian flu as rapid diagnostic tests (lateral flow immunoassays) based on the same principle are used to determine if a bird is infected or not.

Over the course of years several people I met said “well if you can monitor machines, you should also be capable of monitoring people”, so even though I knew nothing about medical devices, in 2003, I made a Bluetooth ECG. One thing led to another, and soon I had a whole series of Bluetooth devices in the office: an oximeter for sleep apnea monitoring, a Bluetooth enabled glucometer for diabetics, a spirometer for asthmatics etc…..and gradually the focus shifted from wireless industrial monitoring to personal health monitors.

We now have a dozen customers for our Bluetooth medical devices and have initiated several pilot projects: one for managing gestational diabetes, one for sleep apnea monitoring, and we have also recorded and transmitted the ECG of endurance ahtletes such as marathon runners, skiers. Outside the medical and fitness monitoring domains, we have received requests for veterinary applications of our sensors. It is clear that because of much fewer ethical and regulatory issues, this is an area that could grow at a faster pace than eHealth.

In October 2005, Cyberfab won the Innovact Trophy in the start-up category and this allows us to be working on our next generation product which is a configurable wireless datalogger and transmitter, but I can not give too many details at the moment. We have applied for two patents and plan on applying for others as one possibility to sell our product design would be through licensing agreements. I think that IP protection is a very important aspect for SMEs and will now place more emphasis on it as a lot of the value of our company is in its intangible assets.