Employee introduction05 Working hard to develop new products
Focus of last few years is myoelectric sensors

Tell us about your major at university and your research subjects.

I majored in physics at university, researching optics. Specifically, the characteristics of the intermediate state of light and matter, called "polariton". My current job originated from when I began programming during my research to simulate the state of light.

When you were looking for employment, what types of work and industries did you look at? Also tell us why you chose SMK in the end.

I wanted to learn some technologies and develop products that added high value and which would be useful for people. Thinking that high-performance sensors was a field that might accelerate, given the focus on IoT, I hoped to enter the electronics industry.

I applied for selection across the industry from big companies to middle-sized ones. At that time, the Strategic Planning Dept. at SMK was pioneering a new business related to sensing networks. I wanted to work in the field of IoT, so to me that looked very appealing. It was the idea that as a new recruit, even I could dive into a new business field, that made me decide to come here.

What were your feelings about SMK after you started working here?

I was assigned to the Research & Development Center developing software. I thought I could use my programming experience from my student days there. It was a workplace where I could grow through trial and error, where my output was valued rather than just being taught how to do the job from A to Z.

Tell us about your job.

Currently, as a software engineer I develop sensor-operating software and algorithms to extract value-added data from sensor data. Our focus over the last few years has been myoelectric sensors. Myoelectric sensors are sensors that detect electric signals from the central nervous system that move muscles. By using myoelectric sensors, we can analyze human muscle activity in detail. Eventually, I would like to provide services that help improve performance and maintain health in the fields such as sport and healthcare.

Tell us about a job that made the deepest impression on you.

The project that left the biggest impression on me was the development of a prototype wireless electrocardiograph system for a company that provides medical services, which I experienced in my fifth year at SMK. The wireless electrocardiograph system was a collection of eight independently operating electrocardiographs. The electrocardiograms (ECGs) from each electrocardiograph were relayed by Bluetooth and displayed on a computer screen. The customer's requirements were tough: eight electrocardiographs out of sync by less than 2 ms per minute, but we were able to meet these by optimizing the system using both hardware and software approaches.

Until that point, our perspective was only developing the software for each individual device, but in this project we learned to optimize the system as a whole including the hardware. Therefore, it broadened the horizons of development.

Tell us about something that you found difficult at work.

In software development, bugs always arise, but it is not easy to identify the cause.
In such cases, I thought we needed to increase our understanding of the problem at hand. In order to identify the location of the same issue, I would separate out the code that was definitely correct using measuring instruments from potentially problematic code, then work little by little toward the heart of the problem. Resolving bugs is also often a question of experience, so I have learned plenty of clues from participating actively in reviews with my software team colleagues.

Describe your dreams and goals.

My short-term objective is to take a product currently at the development stage to launch. The products of the Innovation Center such as myoelectric sensors have not yet found their way around the world, so demonstrating the concrete benefits to clients is quite a challenge. Resolving this means we need "ease of adoption", "speed of outcomes feedback" and "clear advice to users".
In future, I hope to come up with a product that achieves profitability of over 10% in an SMK product field.