technology innovation
from heart rate to activity level to hydration, all in a thin, sticker-like package. This has enormous potential in the health, wellness, and health care markets.
The company’s active partnerships, collaborations, and funding sources, including Massachusetts General Hospital, the US Navy, and Reebok, demonstrate the broad impact of mc10’s platform. For mc10, Windham’s support and involvement represents an ideal addition to the existing team.
less error than when the patient had to remember times and doses. It facilitates the bionic man and woman and more. Indeed the longer term objectives are truly awesome, with talk of unintrusive electronics in the folds of the brain.
Future functionality Taking the broader view that stretchable electronics makes a host of new functions possible we see investors sensing that this nascent industry is indeed at a tipping point. Too often the objectives have been engineering-led and unambitious. Add 100 creative designers and commercialisation will leap forward at a blistering pace.
Mc10 focuses on healthcare applications, commercialising the outstanding advances in the subject provided by the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. It completed a Series b fundraising bringing the round’s total to $14.75 million in September 2011. mc10 takes electronics ‘out of the box’ to create thin, conformal systems that are able to move with the natural world. The company combines breakthrough technology with innovative engineering to develop exciting new consumer, medical, and industrial products. mc10 is headquartered in Cambridge, MA.
“Mc10 represents a game-changing technology for medical devices and health care electronics,” said Adam Fine, Managing Director of investor Windham Venture Partners, experts in healthcare. “We are pleased to provide both capital and expertise to accelerate their products and partnerships in life science applications.”
Mc10’s ability to create bendable, stretchable systems out of otherwise rigid high performance electronics has immediate benefits for health and wellness products. For example, mc10 is working on “electronic skin”, which can measure everything
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www.siliconsemiconductor.net Issue III 2012
“Windham complements the skills and interests of our other venture investors,” said mc10’s CEO David Icke. “They bring a driven, entrepreneurial approach along with a deep knowledge and far- reaching experience that will help us build our life science electronics business.”
Now investors are alert for the mc10 of other sectors for stretchable electronics given that so much of the engineering is ready to move into pre- production. There is already origami electronics and car electronic and electrical parts that can mould into position as the vehicle is constructed.
However, tackling this calls for a completely different approach and value chain from traditional electronics and electrics with its focus on companies making different components and other companies that put them all together in a box and make them work.
Traditional electronics and electrics does not involve the paper and packaging, publishing or printing industry to any significant extent. It has input from the chemical and plastics industry but the new electronics turns all this on its head with totally new forms of collaboration becoming essential and much of the added value going to the chemical industry in particular.
Those that try to use the old approach of making and selling individual components by just printing them tend to go out of business because what the market and the economics demand is complete smart labels etc that perform a function at lowest cost. Even ink making comes centre stage as does the replacement of print and manual procedures before the replacement of electronics.
Excitingly, some of those inks will even include such exotica as carbon nanotube and graphene springs and transparent, not just stretchable and foldable electronics becomes widely possible.
© 2012 Angel Business Communications. Permission required.
Permission
granted.Image by John Rogers, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
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