 Hey, welcome to Stan Energy Man. I'm Stan Osterman from the Hawaii Center for Advanced Transportation Technology. He's part of D-Bed and the High Tech Development Corporation up there in Manoa. And today we have a great guest who's coming to us from the High Tech Development Corporation up in Manoa and then Manoa Innovation Center on Woodland Avenue, Nissan Givari from Adnoviv. Adnoviv. Is that right? Adnoviv. Adnoviv. Welcome to the show. Glad to have you here. Thank you very much for having me. And so I know this is technology I'm not really familiar with in great detail and this is an energy show so I know that you know I've been told it definitely applies to saving energy which is part of what we talk about on this show. So why don't you give the audience a little bit of an idea of how you got into this business or how you helped start the business and a little bit of your background. Sure. So my background is electrical engineering. I got my bachelor master and PhD in electrical engineering. I graduated from UH Manoa with my doctorate degree in 2015. My advisor is the founder of the company and what we make at the company is actually based on my PhD research. Agreed. So I graduated 2015. The company, Adnoviv, started in 2013, late 2013 and we make intelligent occupancy sensors. Primarily my research was about microwave Doppler radars that we use for medical purposes getting respiration rate, heart rate, vital signs. And I was trying to have a better signal stimulation, increasing the signal to noise ratio, reducing noise, basically improving the performance of Doppler radar sensing for medical purposes and one of the experiments we did at the time was measuring a human activity level. Since we can measure the vital signs, we were thinking let's see how can we do with different activity of a person inside the room. And we published that paper and later on we think we thought about that this is a good idea that we can use this one as an occupancy sensor. So the whole thing started from there and we were able to get the National Science Foundation support for our project. So we secured the couple rounds of funding from National Science Foundation and State of Hawaii and I am a vice president of research at the company right now. Great. Where are you originally from? I'm from Iran originally. I got my bachelor master's there. I worked for a couple years then I came to UH Manoa and started my PhD over there. So you picked Hawaii? You didn't want to go to like Phoenix or Texas or something? There are very few groups in the United States working in my field and Hawaii is one of the best groups working. That's good to know. Right. And I was very lucky to to got the scholarship and came here. So you would give UH Engineering School of Engineering pretty high grades in terms of you know the quality of their education of these? Right. UH at least the graduate school that I went to in graduate level they have a pretty high level and as I said like there are few groups working in the United States in this field and one of the leading groups actually is in Hawaii. Great. That's good to know. So how did you come up with Adna Vivas? That's kind of an interesting name for company. I'm sure you didn't have trouble getting a trademark or a copyright on it. So what's the background from that as you understand it? Right. So the founder of the company came up with this name and it has a Latin root. One of the applications of physiological sensing wireless physiological sensing could be finding the victims behind the rebels or finding lives. And as far as I know Adnavib means finding life. So we picked that name for the company and as you said it's not hard to to have a trademark for this one. I'm glad you made the connection to radar because actually from my military background I have a little bit of experience that but not everybody understands what Doppler radar is and so is this technology an extension of Doppler or based on Doppler radar? So it's based on Doppler radar what we do we actually send out the microwave signals we transmit the signal and believe it or not the chest to modulate the microwave signal and even your heart. So what we get in the receiver what we are trying to achieve is extracting the tiny contractions of the heart that induces to the chest or your lungs and then getting the vital signs out of that but there are so many challenges in doing that. So this must be a fairly small resolution cell in that radar then. Right. You're picking up that tiny of a change and okay. Right. And so it's the first integrated circuit for this one came out in 2000 and since then there were a lot of improvements making it smaller faster cheaper better and we thought this is the best time to to launch this product that we came to a point that we can make a device that is has a superior performance and can compete with the existing occupancy sensors with the same price but having a much better accuracy and detection. So yeah because a lot of occupancy sensors now are just basically you enter a room it senses that there's some most some kind of motion in the room and then it turns on your lights or turns off on your air conditioning or whatever. So yours is about in the same price point as those kind of technologies but you can actually like measure a person's body temperature or what how much more precise is yours and what exactly do you measure. Right. So the problem with the current occupancy sensors in the market is those sensors are made to to be a motion sensor. Yeah. We are making a sensor that can detect life and we call it true human presence detection or true part. And so those sensors are very crude as well. The resolution is very low and they have a lot of false negative or positive problems. I feel like a lot of people experience that when you stay still sitting at a desk typing the lights would go off and you have to wave your arms. That's true. I didn't think about that because there are no time or two. Right. Right. So that's exactly what users end up doing. They don't either use the occupancy sensors because of the notices associated with it or they crank up the sitting to have the lights on for 30 or more on. And we'd add no true part. We actually can sense your respiration and heart rate even your sitting still. From the moment you're in till the moment you leave and it doesn't matter how long. So if since we are going after a very tiny motions if we have major motions such as walking or other local motions it's hard to focus on respiration and heart. But we can detect a major motion. So we can detect there's a major motion. But when you're sitting still those motions are much smaller than we can focus on respiration and heart rate and extract those motions and then detect there's still a human there then keep the lights on don't shut up shut down the AC systems and things like that. So if the building already has some kind of occupancy sensing technology is yours kind of plug and play where you can literally just give them a finer resolution system at roughly the same kind of cost or right. That's actually what we try to achieve. So for roughly for the same price point we were we were trying to make a module that can be retrofitted to existing wall switches. We were actually talking to to one of the companies and they asked interesting questions. Can you hide it behind the ceiling. Can you put it there. Can you do. And for example for infrared it has to be line of sight. Right. So you cannot block it behind something. It couldn't be behind something. But we can because microwave can penetrate to true certain objects. But depends on the application we don't really we can tweak the settings and parameters of the radar to sense the occupants inside the room. We're not interested to detect like somebody is in the next room. But but this radar has that capability to but depends on how do you design it and how you set the parameters. So for specific application. So is there like though I'm a maximum sized room that you could put one sensor in and you're not put another sensor like it like this room is maybe 30 feet by 20 feet. And I'm sure one sensor would cover the whole room. But how big can you go and still just use one sensor. So we did different range test things with the sensor and we were able even to detect the respiration rate out from a 75 meter. Wow. That's right. But depends which application you want to use it because if you increase the power or radar antenna pattern and and different parameters associated with the radar, you can have different coverage. But depends on the application we can design it. And the good thing about this design is it's very flexible. So depends on how how you want to deploy it so you can change the design parameters to to cover. But roughly it can cover we we tested our sensor side by side with the commercial occupancy sensors in the market, which are mainly infrared and ultrasonic and our sensor can cover the same area that those sensors are covering. Have you ever thought of using this application also in the security system, not just the occupancy system, but a security system instead of a motion detector? That's a great question. We were talking to actually potential partners. And they said right now we are using three different sensors for controlling lighting, air conditioning and security. So the one of the goals we are trying to achieve is combining all these sensing into one central system, one one sensor basically can sense for all three of them. But it can have security applications and previously it has been used for intrusion detection. Okay, and one of the things that we are trying to achieve actually combining these sensors, for example, for air conditioning systems, they usually rely on co2 sensors, you have imagine a ballroom, you have so many people, it takes a long time to build up enough co2, then these sensors would detect it and they, they send the command to air handlers and other things to to condition the air. But with our sensor, we can actually count the number of occupants in a room. And in a much faster fashion, can control the the air systems. So that's one of the things that we are trying actually to do to combine the security application, the air conditioning application and the lighting systems. That's awesome. Okay, we're coming up on a quick break here, we're going to take 60 seconds and talk about some of the other shows that are here on Think Tech Hawaii. And we'll be right back with a song. Hi, I'm Tim Apachello. I'm the host of Moving Hawaii Forward, a show dedicated to transportation issues and traffic issues here on Oahu. Join us every other Tuesday at 12 noon. And as we discuss how we try to solve our traffic headaches, not to, not to include just the rail but transit and carpooling and everything in between. So join us every other Tuesday, Moving Hawaii Forward. Thank you. Hi, this is Jane Sugimura. I'm the co-host for Condo Insider. And we're on Think Tech Hawaii every Thursday at three o'clock. And we're here to talk about condominium living and issues that affect condominium residents and owners. And I hope you'll join us every week on Thursday. Aloha. My name is Calvin Griffin, host of Military in Hawaii, which airs here on Think Tech Hawaii every Friday at 11 a.m. Please join us. We'll be talking about issues concerning our military, veterans community and other related issues that concern all of us. Hey, welcome back to Stand the Energy Man on my lunch hour. I'm glad to be here today talking to one of the companies and new companies up at the Manoa Innovation Center. Isan here has got a great product that I'm learning about and I think has a lot of value, probably even in more areas than he's thought of yet, but I know he's going to get a lot of ideas when people start hearing about what they what they design and what they build. So Isan, we talked about the sensor and how it is microwave based so it can see through certain materials, not everything, but but it can be tuned so it doesn't see through every wall or, you know, you're not going to worry about people next door being detected. But what is the power output of this thing and the safety aspects of a microwave? And so people get really nervous about cell phone radiation or whatever and the internet can have all kind of nasty stuff on it in 30 seconds if you don't explain the safety part. So I'll explain the safety side of your product. Sure, we actually faced this problem before and a lot of people were worried about the safety aspects of it. The output power usually at the antenna level is less than 10 dBm, which is pretty low. It's lower than the cell phone radiation. And the other thing that people should consider is that you put your cell phone next to your brain, next to your head, but you put the sensor in a room probably at one corner 15 feet away from you. And the radiation power attenuates a lot by by distance. So if the cell phone is problematic, and if there's a safety concerns about that one, it's bigger than yours. It's much bigger than this one. So good. Well, that's good to get up front. So people don't worry about that. Well, we talked about that. We have a short video here of some of the folks that work with you talking about the technology. So why don't we run that video so everybody can be a part of that conversation. Intelligent occupancy sensors that can save energy without compromise. One of the leading causes of this energy race is not having an effective and efficient technology that turns off the lighting and climate control systems in unoccupied rooms. The amount of CO2 emission generated from this wasted energy is equivalent to 100 million cars. That's half the cars in the United States. And of course, with wasted energy comes wasted money. $60 billion wasted annually to such a simple task of turning the lights on and off. So what's the problem? We all know occupancy sensors exist and they can potentially save up to 50% of energy. But those sensors detect motion not through human presence. With AvaViv's true path, you get true presence of light with the better technology that not only turn lights on, but it keeps them on as long as they need to be on and shut them off when you are not reading them because our sensor is so accurate that it can detect the tiny contractions of heart and that's how we save both energy and light. Particular millions of dollars in research we developed over the years used by the military and medical researchers and applying it to the energy efficient commercial sector. With our six patents, we can detect true human presence by taking the vacant looking military equipment and convert it into a small device that can be retrofitted to existing WOSWIGs. Our PC sensing market alone is in the billions predicted to be over $4.5 billion by 2020. Our main focus is office buildings, which account for over one third of all interest in solar units since half of that is directed toward lighting and HVAC systems, which makes our technology directly addresses. This team has been working on this technology for the past five years together. Collectively, we have more than 50 years of experience and we are the leading experts in this field. We are at true human presence detection, producing energy consumption, lowering energy bills, all from Hawaii. So there's a little bit of insight from the folks working on AdWeeve. And so it's on what's a possible application of maybe using this in like senior living conditions where you have folks where maybe they're on their own living in an assistant community or someplace where they're not like in a care home, but they have a lot of mobility, independence and things. But it's a way to kind of keep an eye and make sure that they're okay when they are alone. Do you have anything in mind for that? Right. We had actually a paper about home monitoring and I've seen a couple other papers about this one. It can be used for 24 seven home monitoring. And right now, especially for respiration rate, heart rate, it's like a spot monitoring. You go to a doctor, you monitor it one time and those parameters can be changed very rapidly based on your condition. And 24 monitoring would be very helpful for medical professionals to assess your health status, especially for elderly people and senior citizens. One of the applications that this sensor can have is fall detection. Basically, it can detect if a fall happens and can call certain numbers or seek for help, especially the population of elderly people are growing and can be used for that purpose as well. Yeah, I might need this in a couple of years. I'm getting up here. Hopefully not. I'm a grouchy little guy, I'm getting old. What are some of the other things that you have in mind for the future of your company? Any areas you are kind of envisioning going into that kind of grow off of what we talked about? Right. So the beauty about this Doppler radar sensing that can have many different applications. For example, one of the DOD applications that came up before, they were interested in to know if the vital signs of a fallen soldier in the battlefield before risking the other people's life to go and save him. Or it can be used as we touched upon it at the beginning that if an earthquake happens, we want to know the people who are still alive behind the rebels. They are still bits. It can have medical applications that there are certain applications that you cannot put electrodes on the patient body, such as burn injury victims or you need to think about that. That's true. Or infants. And it can be used for sleep monitoring. We actually did extensive testing in Coins Hospital for sleep monitoring. The current gold standard for sleep monitoring, they use a very obtrusive spirometers and other sensors that the sensor itself can change the sleeping pattern. Right. Right. Right. But with this sensor that you can just put it besides the bed and in monitor your vital signs and respiration, heart rate. So it can have many different applications. And once we started the company, we thought if we want to go after every market, it would be a distraction and we couldn't achieve what we wanted to. But we thought especially for Hawaii, since the tourism industry is the main industry in here, we thought occupancy detection would be the best market for us to start it. But we can expand it as you mentioned in the future. And one of the things we are trying to do is consolidate these, for example, applications together, as you said, for security applications, lighting, AC systems, they use three different sensors which we feel is not necessary and it can be combined. Well, when you're a Fortune 500 company a couple years from now, just remember that you were on Think Tech Hawaii with Stan Energy and make sure you contribute to Think Tech and help them keep going. Sure, sure, of course. Hopefully we will end up there and we will never forget you. OK, so right now your array is set up to kind of sweep a room or cover a room. But in radar, you normally, while you have an antenna that moves to give you a suite, but is this like digital? So it's set up to cover a certain width or you can actually focus it when you told me about the battlefield application, that would be something where you'd like point it right at something and take a spot reading rather than an area reading. So is it a totally different technology or just you change the focus down to a narrower focus? Right, right, right. So that that is more about the antenna design and radiation pattern of that for an application like a battlefield. You want a very narrow beam antenna like a horn antenna that you can focus for a long distance. But for our application, we wanted to make it compact and cover more area. So we're using patch antennas 60 degree or more beam bits, which is roughly comparable with the present occupancy detectors. So one of the experiments that we did before, we did testing according to NEMA standard. Those are the common standards for occupancy sensors. So we followed those standards and we did all the testing in UH Manoa classrooms. So we divided the rooms into one three feet by three feet cells and basically how they tested one person moves from cell to cell and they try to detect it or they have a robotic arm that it goes from one cell to the other one and they try which cells that they can detect in both experiments. Our sensor has much superior performance and we went actually beyond NEMA standard and we had a mechanical target simulating respiration and heart rate very, very tiny motions. And so apparently only our sensor was capable of detecting that. So what have, if you can tell me, I don't know, sometimes you don't want to, new companies don't want to say who they're talking to, but have you had interest from any big companies lately that are looking at your technology? Right. We we had actually a very good conversations with a couple of companies. Johnson Control in Hawaii is one of the country companies which is interested in our technology and they wanted to see a third party validation or more performance testing. And right now we are we are deploying our sensors or modified prototype to be tested in Hawaii Natural Energy Institute frog building. They have a zero net energy building and they tightly monitor temperature, humidity and other factors inside the room. We are trying to deploy our sensor with common occupancy sensors and measure measure it for a couple of months and have a very extensive quantitative analysis between our sensor and the common occupancy sensors. And we are going to deploy cameras there as well to have a gold standard. Which sensor would perform better in which condition? OK. That's great. Well, I'm wishing your company the best of luck and I'm glad I had you on today because quite frankly when I was thinking about what you would use this kind of sensor for I had a little different perspective. That's why the title of the show is Are You Out? We have an application for that. Like it's going to sense body heat or other thermal imaging kind of things I'm used to seeing in an occupancy sensor. So I'm glad that we scored that away and I got educated here. But it's really cool and I think there's probably a lot more ahead of your way when you really start thinking of how your Doppler microwaves can really do a lot more than most people are thinking about right now, even the folks inside your company, because you've definitely captured a little piece there that I think has a lot of potential in security markets in like you see in building occupancy energy conservation. I'm sure the folks at Hawaii Energy would love to talk to you about room sensors. They have voltage sensors on the walls and things like that. I'm sure they'd like to talk to you more about yours. I never even thought about the motion sensors. If you're sitting there quietly doing something on a computer, the lights go off. You know, it's like I never even consider that. But I know it happens and then you're right. People just shut it off. They don't use it. And that's part of the problem. Some of these energy efficiency devices, if they give you false positives or false queuing, people just don't use it. If you don't use it, then it's no good as an energy saving device. So thank you for being here. Well, thank you very much for having me. I really appreciate it. This opportunity. Good luck with your company. I think it's pretty exciting. I'm going to be watching for you guys. In fact, when you go public, give me a notice so I can make a lot of money.