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The college of Technology and Engineering of NTNU started to promote education on Innovation and Entrepreneurship two years ago. Prof. Chieh Jen Jie of the Graduate Institute of Electrol-optical Science and Technology, graduate students Wang Yen Hsing, Lee Kuan Jie and Kuo Hung Yi founded the company ISPECT Intelligent Spectrum. They have come up with a fast, easy and accurate orchid virus detecting system that can tell you the result in 3 seconds with higher accuracy rate. 

 

Orchids have high economic value. According to Taiwan’s Institute of Economic Research, the annual output value of Taiwan’s orchids is estimated to be as high as 4 billion, which is the second-largest exporter of orchids in the world and most of them are Phalaenopsis and Oncidium. However, during cultivation and export process, 15% of the orchid will be affected by virus. If the virus is not detected at an early stage, the infected orchids will contaminate other healthy orchids. The entire cabinet of orchids may be destroyed and result in 600-800 million lost per year. Therefore, they decided to come up with a more effective detection method.

 

Guo said that before, test stripes were used on each plant for testing and the virus test took about 25 minutes. It’s not only slow, time-consuming but also labor-intensive with an accurate rate of only 50%. What’s worse, it destroys the plants. The new detection method takes only 3 seconds while keeping the plant intact and a higher accuracy rate of up to 80%. The principle is to use a laser beam to illuminate the orchids and observe the chemical changes, whether the spectrum changes slightly or not. It is truly helpful to the industry to conduct large-scale virus detection.

In addition to patents, this technology has won many domestic and international awards, including the Best Invention Award at the International Federation of Inventors' Associations and the TIKI Gold Award at the 2018 Taiwan International Invention and Design Fair , Gold Award at the Hong Kong Invention Exhibition, 20th Moscow International Salon of Inventions and Innovative Technologies Archimedes Gold Award, Entrepreneurial Potential Award” From IP to IPO, FITI, from the Ministry of Science and Technology and many other competitions. The company was also invited to participate in the InnoVEX Innovation and Innovation Zone of COMPUTEX 2018.