The notion of a lone inventor tinkering away in his dimly-lit garage is a bit of a rarity these days. Thomas Edisons are in short supply. But that doesn't mean the spirit of invention isn't alive and well in this city. It is - and it's taking on some pretty difficult challenges.

By Chet Williamson

Necessity, they say, is the mother of invention. And nothing can bring necessity into the light of day quicker than tragedy. Such was the case in the winter of 1999, when six firefighters lost their lives in the Worcester Cold Storage Warehouse Co. fire.

It's a story Worcester knows well: It was misreported that two homeless people were trapped in the building. During rescue attempts some of the firefighters could not find their way out of the building. Other rescuers went in after the firefighters and they too became disoriented in the density of the heat and smoke. Some died a short distance from the exits and in close proximity to one another.

What went wrong? Wasn't there a device that could tell fire officials exactly where each firefighter was? There wasn't. But many thought there should be. Worcester — being the center for innovation that it is — delivered the answer.

The gauntlet was picked up by a team of electrical and computer engineering faculty and students at WPI. Dr. R. James Duckworth was the principal investigator for the project.

"Our department head at the time said, ‘This is crazy. We should be able to develop some kind of computer systems to help try and locate [firefighters],'" Duckworth says.

With the assistance of more than $4 million in support from the U.S. Department of Justice, the WPI team recently announced the development of a prototype. The assignment has come to be known as "The PPL Project," named after the invention, which is a "precision personnel location" device.

In a city and area with a long history of invention, the PPL Project may not have the jazzy, far-flung appeal of inventions like the birth control pill, the cotton gin and shredded wheat (all invented either in or just outside Worcester), but it's one example of how modern-day innovation is alive and well in this city. Sometimes these innovations come in the form of highly funded projects with life-saving goals; sometimes they're as simple as a new gadget invented by somebody who thought "hey, there should be a product that does this." The PPL is obviously one of the latter.

According to informational material sent out by WPI spokesman Michael Dorsey, the PPL system transmits high-speed data via wired and wireless channels.

Professor Jim Duckworth (left) and student David Hubelbank in a lab at Worcester Polytechnic Institute.

"It is a firefighter location and tracking system," Duckworth says. "As you probably know, GPS [global positioning satellite] devices work great outdoors, but it don't work at all indoors. We've developed a wireless-based approach to be able to track firefighters, law enforcement — any personnel inside a building."

The system has a range of 2,000 feet and can track upward of 100 people. Duckworth says the way it works is individuals carry a transmitter device that is picked up by receivers outside the building, maybe on a truck parked nearby.

"Through our software we can determine exactly where anyone is at any time," he adds. "Then the incident commander can see on a laptop display the location of all their personnel."

The project has received support from the Worcester Fire Department. In December the PPL team gave a demonstration of the system to Fire Chief Gerard Dio and 10 other local fire chiefs.

"We can't just do this in isolation in our labs, we have to make sure that it is going to meet the customer requirements," Duckworth says. "What we try to do is keep reminding ourselves that if there was a catastrophe like that again, hopefully technology will stop it from becoming another disaster."

Whatever suits your pallet

Barbara Van Reed is the inventor of a portable modular pallet.

Necessity ignites inventions for all occasions — not just high-profile tragedies. Take Barbara Van Reed. Her invention is a modular storage pallet.

"I was living in a house in Southboro and the basement flooded," she says. "Everything I had put on the floor got wet, including a lot of my kids' kindergarten drawings. After that I started keeping everything off the floor. I did it in a makeshift way — getting bricks putting boards on them, whatever I could find. Then I said, ‘Well, there's got to be a better way.'"

That was in 2003. At the time Van Reed was working at Data General as a product manager. "So I'm familiar with the process of designing and manufacturing a product," she says. "When I left Data General, which was when they were acquired by EMC, I decided that I would try to develop the idea myself. I'm not an engineer. So I found an industrial designer to do the actual design." What she wound up with was an adjustable system made out of heavy-duty plastic that allows you to build a pallet to raise items off the ground. Unlike heavy, rigid wooden pallets, these can be formed into different shapes and sizes and are easily disassembled — and they're lightweight."

Working without the net of a large corporation or institution for support, Van Reed spent a lot of time perusing the United States Patent and Trademark Office database (for a complete rundown on how to get your invention patented and protected, visit www.uspto.gov).

"I researched the patents," she says. "I went to every store in the state to see if there was anything else like it that addressed the same purpose. There wasn't. I went online to see if there was a product like it. I couldn't find anything like it anywhere."

In 2004, after approaching a series of manufacturers who were disinterested in the idea, Van Reed decided to do it herself and demonstrate that there is a market.

"I had the product tooled [the mold made] in Taiwan," she says. "I had the prototype done here in the United States. The design was done locally. The first shipment came in ‘05. The first shipment was half a container of 1,500 units. Then I started selling them through catalogs."

Van Reed's company is called Addendia Inc., you can find it on line at www.addendia.com. She has both a utility patent on the product, along with a design patent.

"Hopefully that will offer me some protection," Van Reed says, "but I am not so naãve as to think that if some company just wanted to take it on, that I could effectively fight that."

"Initially I started making them in Taiwan," she says, "but the whole process cost a lot more than anticipated — the shipping costs, the duties, the brokering, the storage costs and then having them shipped to customers. So when I needed to reorder, I did a cost analysis and found out that it was cheaper to have them made in the United States."

The modular storage pallet is now manufactured at Customatic, a plastics plant on Boylston Street. To date, Van Reed has sold 9,000 units and recently received orders from The Container Store, which wants a caseload for more than 40 stores.

Sound like a success story? Perhaps, but it wasn't easy.

"This has been an extremely difficult process to try and market. I've run into rejection. The big companies don't even answer me. It's very discouraging. Then I get calls from people who have bought the product and they tell me how much they like it. That gives me the energy to keep going."

When asked if she sees herself as an inventor, Van Reed answers by saying, "Initially I did. I said I was going to invent products that are not high-tech. They may be low-tech, but they are going to have utility and value to people. Today I don't. The difficulties with this have put aside any thoughts of continuing to invent. If I can succeed with this then I'll do other things."

The battle for an idea

The notion of a lone inventor tinkering away in his garage is more of a 20th century creation. Today's inventors are wired interactive innovators and definitely not detached. Old World inventors remain independent, but still look for support and the opportunity to be heard when they yell, "Eureka!" The Worcester Area Inventor's Group is one such forum. Once a month, members meet at the main branch of the Worcester Public Library to talk shop.

Barbara Wyatt says she got involved in the group because her father was an inventor.

"My dad made several products," she says. "One of them was a plastic funnel that snapped onto quart cans of oil. We had patent battles that we lost. Then I found out how hard it was for inventors.

"I had to fight a big company. I did sue for patent infringement because I was young and naïve. I thought I was going to win. They said if I succeeded I would be a threat to them. I wasn't trying to be a threat; I was trying to get the product on the market. They are not going to steal something that doesn't sell.

"For our product, more money went to lawyers than what came to us," Wyatt says.

Wyatt says these issues — as well as inventions themselves — are discussed in the inventors' club. "There are dozens of people with stories like this," she says. "They don't always hit the papers because people want the big victories."

Robert Barton, owner and founder of TechLite Designs, is an independent inventor working out of his home in Grafton. For years he's been working on a power-failure safety light that is integrated into wall switches and electrical outlets. See: www.power-sure.com.

"For the longest time it remained an idea, but it kept on coming back to me throughout the ‘90s — every time we had a power failure. Over that period of time, technology just wasn't available for miniaturizing everything and giving enough light to be useful. But since about 2000, when the LEDs [light-emitting diodes] started showing up with high brightness, that's when things fundamentally changed. The technology was now available to make a light small enough to put into an outlet."

Barton says he received his first patent in 2004, a second in October, ‘05. "There is a big market for the device," he contends. "Year after year we get hit with storms. Look at all the power failures. I have a design for one of the big wiring houses. It's close. On the other hand, there is someone who produced one of these and we are looking into patent infringement issues."

Talking about the trials of taking an invention from idea to product to market, Barton says, "My goal has always been to license the intellectual property rather than start a venture. One issue with the venture itself is that here in New England, the people who are doing funding — venture capitalists, angel investors and the rest — they are all interested in high-tech, bio-tech and pharmaceutical — all the sexy stuff. And for something like this, which is sort of mundane — it's barely a consumer electronics device — these guys are not willing to go into it. They don't know much about the industry."

Though independent, Barton says he has attended the WPI Venture Forum, which is a monthly program held at the school designed to serve entrepreneurs seeking to start their own technology-based businesses. The next session will be Feb. 12 (See www.wpiventureforum.org).

Founded 1865, WPI was started on the revolutionary idea of integrating classroom theory with practical application. The school's founding fathers — John Boynton, Ichabod Washburn and Stephen Salisbury II — also recognized that this city was the perfect setting to transform the concept into action. Current WPI President Dennis Berkey shares that view.

"Worcester is our laboratory in many ways," he says. "We have a lot of project teams that actually go out and spend time in corporations. When you bring it to Worcester, our philosophy is WPI is really embedded in the city. We are part of the city. What's good for Worcester will be good for WPI.

"Now we have a lot of start-up companies that are coming out of WPI and entrepreneurship and innovation are really important themes and we want to spin that out into the community so that Worcester can really benefit, as well as the university."

An example of such a business is Advanced Body Sensing, a new company founded by Professors Yitzhak Mendelson and the aforementioned R. James Duckworth.

Last summer they began leasing space in Gateway Park - a newly constructed off-campus complex built by WPI along with several other partners — to make something called a wearable wireless pulse oximeter, a device that was developed as a kind of spin-off to the PPL Project.

Duckworth says, "We then said, ‘Well, we not only want to know the location of the firefighters but also their vital signs.' The No. 1 cause of death among firefighters is not fire or smoke. It is actually having a heart attack."

Mendelson, who is a professor in the biomedical department at WPI, is the inventor of the device. The pulse oximeter detects blood oxygenation, pulse, and respiration rate by shining red and infrared light through the skin and measuring how the different frequencies are absorbed by pulsing arterial blood.

Duckworth is the computer engineer who helped Mendelson take the concept into a field-deployable system.

"It is essentially a self-contained unit that you can wear under a headband on your forehead," Duckworth says. "It is wireless. It has a small battery inside like a watch battery. You can put this on your forehead and then it transmits your vital signs to a receiver. We can then not only find your oxygen saturation information, but deduce your heart rate and respiration at the same time."

The company already has its first contract to supply about 50 of the devices to the U.S. Air Force Special Forces. 

"They are particularly interested in how their soldiers are doing out on missions," Duckworth says. "They want to know their physiological signs to help them with triage or rescue and recovery. Or they can just look at the health status of individuals over their mission duration."

Another Gateway Park startup with WPI connections is ECI Biotech.

"We produce a whole variety of very simple, inexpensive and rapid diagnostics," says Vice President Mitch Sanders. "They are rapid enough to work in five minutes — safe enough to go on your skin, inexpensive enough that we can make sensors for pennies, in some cases."

In 2005, ECI was given an SBANE (Small Business Association of New England) Award for its intellectual property, or IP. "We have a very strong IP portfolio of 18 patents that are issued worldwide," Sanders says. "The cool thing that I like about our sensors is they can go on anything from consumer products to medical devices to let you know whether there is going to be an infection or if there is bacterial contamination.

"For instance, we have little sensors that tell you whether your food is fresh. Then we have rapid diagnostics for wound infection for the point of care. We can also make a Band-Aid change color if you have an infection."

It's all about networking

In 1999, WPI launched the Collaborative for Entrepreneurship & Innovation (CEI). "It's a university-wide entrepreneurship center, locate in the Department of Management," says Associate Director Gina Betti. "It provides services to faculty, students and the general public."

Betti describes herself as "the segue between the idea and the market. I have a lot of people in my network. Somebody calls me up and I say, ‘You've got to talk to so and so.' I can give you an example. There's a guy who called me who is 70 years old, who has invented a simple exercise bench for the lower back. He lives on Lake Winnipesaukee. Somehow he got my name. We talked and he stopped me mid-stream and said, ‘My, you certainly have a lot of enthusiasm for my idea.'

"It's just that I know where we can plug this in. I think if we redesign this part of it and make it portable and lighter and less costly to manufacture, I think you can take this from institutional use to home use."

Keeping track of firefighters in critical situations is one goal of WPI’s research.

Another resource for local inventors is also located on the WPI campus. The program is called Genius! Its founders are Zeb Tracy and Paul Kassebaum.

"Genius! is a student-run innovation group," says Kassebaum. "The purpose of the meeting is to facilitate the process of getting ideas to the marketplace. We have creativity exercises. We talk about everything from disruptive technologies to patent infringement. And students get up and do an elevator pitch about their inventions."

Kassebaum says that Genius! provides a safe environment for students to collaborate on ideas that could generate intellectual property.

"One of the ways that we intend to do it is by providing a platform on the Internet that allows information to flow in a non-intuitive way. So you can find project partners that you otherwise wouldn't."

Tracy says the core philosophy of Genius! is that interdisciplinary collaboration is the key to catalyzing rapid project success. "The lone inventor might just hammer away and his patent might look really cool, but if they could just connect with someone who has complementary skills they might be able to move to the next milestone at a much faster rate.

"Collaboration is very important to us," Tracy says. "We feel we can be an agent for positive change in the local community by stimulating economic development and by empowering people."

WPI's Berkey says, "I think sometimes people mis-perceive the inventor or innovator as somebody who just sits in his garage and has an epiphany and says, ‘Oh, here's a good idea. I think I'll produce the fruits of it.' Most innovation happens when people recognize a need and then imagine a way to respond to that need.

"This firefighter location project was motivated when some of our faculty watched that parade for those fallen firefighters in Worcester and said, ‘We can prevent this kind of thing from happening if we really work on this problem.' That's the way a lot of innovation happens." o