APPLIED NANOFEMTO TECHNOLOGIES LLC — National Aeronautics and Space Administration STTR Phase I: T8

Description

Urine testing is an effective method for routine health monitoring. Spectroscopy-based urine test offers a highly sensitive and accurate urine test method with much less clinical lab equipment requirement. Existing spectroscopy urine test systems are still bulky, heavy, costly, and with high power consumption and thus not suitable for astronaut health monitoring in space. Photonics integrated circuits (PIC) can integrate numerous photonics devices with a great variety of functionalities in a single ultra-small chip, offering ultra-high performance with extremely low power consumption and significantly improved reliability. This STTR project aims to leverage the advantages provided by cutting-edge PIC technologies and develop a miniature on-chip urine test system with significantly reduced size, weight, and power consumption (SWaP) and improved reliability for routine astronaut health monitoring.In phase, I, the proposed PIC-enabled on-chip urine test system will be evaluated and compared with existing technologies. Optimal design of the PIC based broadband spectroscopic urine test system with high performance and ultra-low SWaP will be obtained.In Phase II, a prototype of the miniature PIC-based broadband spectroscopic urine test system with ultra-low SWaP will be developed and tested. Urine testing with high sensitivity and high accuracy will be demonstrated.