Three local innovations which have made waves here and overseas since 2000 merited mentions in Finance Tharman Shanmugaratnam's Budget speech in Parliament last week. Liaw Wy-Cin takes a peek behind the gadgets.
He realised dream of purple gold jewellery
WHEN Sir Elton John was in Dubai a few years ago, he stopped at a gem store to buy some jewellery forged from purple gold.
The British pop singer is not the only fan of the vibrant metal, first hatched in a Singapore workshop a decade ago.
It has been gaining popularity since it was introduced to the world in 2000. Last year, it racked up more than $10 million in sales in Singapore alone.
This success story was years in the making and was a big personal gamble for the metal's creator, a former lecturer at Singapore Polytechnic.
While purple gold had been around for decades, it was too porous and brittle to mould into jewellery. The challenge to forge a workable compound first piqued the interest of Mr Loh Peng Chum in 1977. Mr Loh, 65, was doing his master's degree in metallurgy in the United States then.
He said: 'It's a very good colour, a colour for royalty. And it's not a colour any religious group objects to. But no jeweller had it.'
He finally took up the task in 1998 to make it more malleable.
Two years later, and with $100,000 of his own money invested in the project, Mr Loh had the solution: a machine that could bond aluminium and gold in a vacuum heated to 10,000 deg C.
The compound's purple tinge is a result of gold and aluminium being mixed together at high temperatures.
Mr Loh said he has made 10 times his initial investment and has re-invested that money in a new metallurgy company called Autium.
He has also come up with ways to forge other metals into various designs, such as layers and checks, and is hoping to get investors for his new creations.
Wireless 'caddy' for nurses
WHAT started as an attempt to help a colleague track his sick child's temperature through the night has blossomed into an innovation used in hospitals here and overseas.
The device that can continuously measure body temperature and send this data wirelessly to a receiver is a product of Cadi Scientific, set up by four colleagues who quit 'very secure' scientific research jobs to set up the company.
The upshot of this innovation: Nurses can ditch the task of manually taking a patient's body temperature every few hours, and the patient gets uninterrupted rest.
The enterprising scientists have had their first big break with their gadget, called the ThermoSENSOR.
Singapore General Hospital (SGH), National University Hospital and KK Women's and Children's Hospital are using it to monitor some of their patients' temperatures wirelessly.
The device has also found its way into hospitals in Bangkok and Taipei, which are using it in their intensive care wards.
Tan Tock Seng Hospital (TTSH), on the other hand, ordered 2,000 pieces of a modified version of the gadget called the SmartTAG, which tracks the movements of its patients as they move from department to department in the hospital for various tests or treatments.
Cadi Scientific's founding director and chief executive Zenton Goh, 39, while declining to reveal figures, said the company's revenue has been doubling every year. Cadi's books are expected to be in the black for the first time this year.
The 3cm wide ThermoSENSOR, taped to a patient's body, measures body temperature continuously and then uses radio frequency technology to transfer the data wirelessly to a computer at the nurses' station.
With the captured data, nurses are able to spot clusters of patients developing fever at the same time, which may indicate an infection making its rounds, said founding company director and chief marketing officer Lim Soh Min, 36.
It is radio frequency technology that also allows patients to be tagged and tracked.
At TTSH, the SmartTAG is a part of a patient's identification tag on his wrist. Receivers installed around the hospital monitor where he is.
Cadi Scientific is now working on incorporating other vital signs like blood pressure and pulse rate into the wireless monitoring system. SGH is already testing the prototype.
Cadi plans to take its gadget to the region, China, the United States and the Middle East.
Asked about the company's name, Dr Goh explained that it is a play on the word 'caddy'.
'Like a golfer's caddy who helps carry the golfer's load and sometimes offers advice, we want to do the same for our customers too,' he said.
Cooking up eggs that are meal and medicine
PUT a traditional chicken farmer and the head of a biotech company together and what do you get?
New-age designer eggs.
One of the latest types to hit the market, cordyceps eggs were developed right here.
These eggs containing the active ingredient of the Chinese herb cordyceps hit the market just two months ago. And already, Chew's Agriculture is fielding queries on them from Australia, New Zealand and Europe.
The company's managing director, Mr Chew Eng Hoe, 43, is also in talks with Hong Kong and Canadian companies.
The special 'medicinal' eggs are the result of Chew's working with local biotech company AP Nutripharm.
The work on cordyceps eggs started two years ago, said Nutripharm's managing director Mark Xu, 49.
He said his company was looking into developing animal feed additives that would replace antibiotics, which have been used in animal feed for ages.
Nutripharm zoomed in on cordyceps, known in traditional Chinese medicine to lower cholesterol and prevent cancer.
Cordyceps, or cordyceps sinensis, is a type of parasitic fungus that attacks a species of caterpillar in winter and feeds off their insides.
But Nutripharm's laboratories grows its own cordyceps by recreating the conditions for its growth without needing to use caterpillars.
The harvested cordyceps are then added to the chicken feed.
The eggs of chickens given this feed contain cordycepin, a key biochemical needed by the human body for energy transfer in the cells.
Neither Mr Chew nor Dr Xu would reveal the cordycep-to-feed proportion.
Of the 500,000 chickens Mr Chew has on his 20ha farm in Lim Chu Kang, 15,000 lay cordy- ceps eggs. The birds eat about six times a day or about 110g of feed each daily.
A hen takes about 27 hours to produce and lay an unfertilised egg, said the farm's production manager Tan Chee Nam, 59.
About 10,000 cordyceps eggs are produced daily.
These go to almost all Cold Storage supermarkets, the larger FairPrice outlets, and major Shop N Save and Prime supermarkets. The eggs are sold in packs of six for $3.95, about twice the cost of 10 regular eggs.
Mr Chew said: 'Those who eat one egg a day say that, after three to four days, they feel less tired and sleep very well.'
Every 100g of cordyceps eggs - equivalent to two such eggs - has 76 micrograms of cordycepin.
His 20-year-old company also produces other designer eggs containing minerals such as selenium, beta-carotene and Omega 3 and 6.
