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OE-A Competition 2021 Winners Announced

The jury rated 22 submissions in three categories.

03.30.21

What added value does Printed Electronics bring to this product?

Which product shows the highest degree of innovation?

And how attractive is it for the target group?

These were the questions for the jury – consisting of representatives from international companies and institutes – of the OE-A Competition 2021 to answer.

The jury rated 22 submissions in three categories.

Companies and institutes from 13 countries around the globe submitted their latest products and demonstrators in the area of organic and printed electronics to the OE-A Competition 2021.

Annually organized by OE-A (Organic and Printed Electronics Association), a working group within VDMA, this competition challenges the printed electronics industry.

“We were excited about how many products and prototypes from such diverse fields as medicine, automotive, wearables or smart buildings took part in the competition," said Dr. Klaus Hecker, managing director of OE-A.

The submitted projects were judged by the jury in three categories: "Prototypes & New Products," "Freestyle Demonstrator" and "Publicly Funded Project Demonstrator."

As every year, all submitted products and demonstrators were presented to the international community at LOPEC, the international platform for printed electronics, which took place as an online format from March 23-25, 2021.

"The winners’ ideas and products show impressively how broad the application opportunities for our industries are," Hecker said. "The OE-A Competition motivates companies to think outside the box. This provides new impulses for the technological development of printed electronics as well as product design and shows users which products and concepts are in the pipeline."

The award ceremony for the "OE-A Competition 2021" will take place online this year on April 15, 2021. The winner of the "Public Choice Award" as well as the price winners of the three categories will then present their demonstrators.

The jury selected the following entries as the best of the OE-A Competition 2021:

Best Prototype / New Product
OccluSense®– Dental Pressure Measuring System
InnovationLab (Germany)

The project offers a digital solution for occlusion control with medical certification. It measures, visualizes, and stores the pressure distribution during the bite process. The printed pressure sensor matrix with more than 1000 pixels registers the pressure applied on each pixel with up to 150 Hz and sends the information wirelessly to a cloud, a tablet or other devices.

Best Freestyle Demonstrator
Dose-counting Smart Label for Inhalers
Fleep Tech (Italy)

The demonstrator features a counting smart label for metered dose inhalers. The smart label, realized on a flexible substrate, integrates a fully printed OTFT based control and driving electronics as well as a fully printed battery, a touch sensor and a commercially available electrophoretic segmented display.

Best Publicly Funded Project Demonstrator
SUPERSMART Anti Counterfeiting Label
Fraunhofer & Partner (Germany)

The demonstrator consists of two paper-based demonstrators realized in the frame of the SUPERSMART project. A shock detection active tag based on a piezo material to track product damage during transport and an anti-counterfeiting label relying on an electrochromic display to authenticate medical or luxury products.

Public Choice Award
S-Console Smart Gear Selector
Centi (Portugal)

The Smart Gear Selector demonstrator is an intelligent control panel for an automatic transmission. Printed electronics enables the reduction of the number of mechanical and electrical parts to seamless design.