Comet grants revealed

A low-cost security eye scanner that is almost 100% accurate and a DNA test to customise individual fitness regimes are among those to receive Commercialising Emerging Technologies (Comet) programme grants, reports Manufacturers' Monthly.

Industry minister, Senator Kim Carr, has released details of the latest Comet grant recipients and their innovative products. Some 33 projects will share in more than $2.1 million worth of grants to bring their products and services to market.

The eye scanner, developed by Wavefront Biometric Technologies, captures and analyses the unique properties of light as it reflects off the human cornea. Highly resistant to fraud, the scanner allows for the reliable identification of individuals.

A miniature telescope implanted into the eye could soon help people with vision loss from end-stage macular degeneration, according to Technology Review.

Last week, an advisory panel for the Food and Drug Administration unanimously recommended that the agency approve the implant. Clinical trials of the device, which is about the size of a pencil eraser, suggest it can improve vision by about three and a half lines on an eye chart.

"This is one of the few options for people with end-stage macular degeneration," says Kathryn Colby, an eye surgeon at the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary in Boston, who helped develop the surgical procedure used to implant the device.

In future a call centre rep could authenticate someone's identity through a system that elicits and listens to specific sounds emitted by their ear, if the groundbreaking work of British scientists proves successful, writes ZDNet.

Such a biometric technique may become commonplace according to an article published in New Scientist. The concept is based on otoacoustic emissions (OAE), which are sounds emitted by the mammalian inner ear in response to an audio stimulation.

Thanks to a research grant awarded in 2007, Stephen Beeby, an engineer at the University of Southampton, UK, and his team of investigators have been working to establish OAE as a robust biometric characteristic.