Challenge
For addressing societal challenges such as the nitrogen crisis, labour shortage and high costs in health care, and labour shortage in agrifood, accurate detection of biochemicals including gases and biomarkers is essential. Yet today’s spectral sensing systems are often bulky, costly, not suitable for real-time feedback and difficult to scale, limiting their deployment outside specialised laboratory environments. In healthcare, sensors lack accuracy and robustness for complex biomarkers in the field of non-invasive monitoring.
Opportunity
Advances in photonic chips-based tuneable -lasers create a major opportunity to miniaturise high-performance spectroscopy and sensing systems. By targeting high-value early markets such as healthcare and environmental emissions monitoring and expanding toward large-scale applications in healthcare, industry, mobility, and smart buildings, this mission can capture significant value by enabling scalable, high-volume deployment of photonic sensing technologies.
Solution
The mission focuses on developing a shared, scalable technology platform based on tuneable-laser PICs, hybrid integration, detectors, and manufacturable packaging. This modular approach enables multiple sensing modalities such as gas sensing, Raman spectroscopy and speckle sensing to be built from common photonic building blocks.
Advanced sensing systems don’t need to be complex to be powerful. Tuneable laser-based photonic platforms allow high performance in a compact, scalable form. This solution creates shared building blocks across applications. It’s about efficiency, flexibility, and real-world usability.
Benefits
Resulting solutions have the potential to enable more compact, energy-efficient,and cost-effective sensing systems with near laboratory-grade performance, which could support improved emissions monitoring, earlier and more accessible health diagnostics, and smarter industrial and agricultural processes.
