Upstate Medical psychiatrists develop suicide-prevention system

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SYRACUSE — Two forensic psychiatrists at the State University of New York (SUNY) Upstate Medical University are developing new technology to prevent suicide among adults in custodial care. The technology could be ready for use in jail settings as soon as 2014, says Dr. Andrew Kaufman, who is working on the effort full time. Kaufman […]

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SYRACUSE — Two forensic psychiatrists at the State University of New York (SUNY) Upstate Medical University are developing new technology to prevent suicide among adults in custodial care.

The technology could be ready for use in jail settings as soon as 2014, says Dr. Andrew Kaufman, who is working on the effort full time. Kaufman and Dr. James Knoll plan to commercialize the system through a startup firm, Zinnia Safety Systems, LLC.

Zinnia will take up residence in the CNY Biotech Accelerator in January and will be one of the first companies in the new facility.

The startup’s system monitors a pulse in the neck that would cease during a suicide attempt by hanging, Kaufman explains. Hanging is the most common method people use to commit suicide in jails, he adds.

The system would recognize the lack of a pulse in 10 to 12 seconds and a transmitter would then alert staff members. The technology also measures blood oxygen saturation, which would drop in someone placed a plastic bag over his or her head or otherwise tried to block airflow to the lungs, Kaufman says.

There’s nothing, Kaufman notes, to prevent someone from removing the pulse monitor, but staff members would know almost instantly if that happened. And that, he adds, would give medical providers valuable information about an individual’s mindset.

“It could indicate the need for a higher level of human observation,” Kaufman says.

Jails at the county and municipality level would be a first market for the technology, Kaufman says. Other facilities such as psychiatric units in hospitals, state prisons, and substance-abuse treatment centers are also on Zinnia’s radar.

The company is exploring monitoring individuals outside custodial settings as well. Kaufman says he’s had early talks about the system with the Center of Excellence for Suicide Prevention at the Veterans Health Administration Medical Center in Canandaigua.

Kaufman says he’ll eventually serve as Zinnia’s chief medical officer and is in the process of recruiting a CEO, other staff members, and a business advisory board. Knoll will serve as director of the firm’s scientific advisory board.

The company has received some early seed funding from Upstate Medical and also a $50,000 grant from the SUNY Research Foundation Technology Accelerator Fund. The money will go toward completion of a prototype and a trial of the technology at Upstate Medical, Kaufman says.

Kaufman adds he has had early talks with some angel investors and expects to raise additional financing in the next six months.

Currently, suicide prevention in custodial settings like jails relies mainly on human observation, Knoll says. Designers have attempted to make environments in those settings safer by, for example, eliminating places where individuals can hang themselves.

But staff members are still essentially the front line of defense by checking on patients or inmates at regular intervals — usually about 15 minutes, Kaufman says. The problem is that brain damage can occur in three to four minutes during a hanging attempt with death in about four or five minutes.

Suicides have even occurred in extremely high-risk individuals where facilities use one-on-one observation, Knoll notes. Observers might have a momentary lapse of concentration or need a break.

And they also might want to give the individual they’re observing some privacy, he adds. The monitoring technology could address those issues.

“This would allow the return of some personal privacy and dignity,” Knoll says.

The clinical trial planned for Upstate Medical will allow Knoll and Kaufman to begin answering some questions over how the system will affect individuals wearing it. Researchers will want to know if the system makes them feel more secure or if it indicates to them that their medical providers are taking their symptoms seriously.

The use of technology like this in psychiatry is long overdue, Knoll adds.

“We truly believe this is a worthy, valuable idea,” he says. “I think the basic notion of suicide prevention in custodial settings is a very important and noble effort.”

Contact Tampone at ktampone@cnybj.com

Cazenovia Equipment breezes into wind, solar markets with energy division

Energy, Environment & Sustainability, Small Business, Subscriber Only

CAZENOVIA — A Central New York farm and landscaping equipment dealer believes it has solid ground on which to build windmills — its reputation. The John Deere dealership Cazenovia Equipment Co. installed its first wind turbines this year — putting up windmills at three dairy farms, one apple orchard, and an organic farm under its

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CAZENOVIA — A Central New York farm and landscaping equipment dealer believes it has solid ground on which to build windmills — its reputation.

The John Deere dealership Cazenovia Equipment Co. installed its first wind turbines this year — putting up windmills at three dairy farms, one apple orchard, and an organic farm under its Cazenovia Equipment Co. Energy division. The division, dubbed CEC Energy for short, hopes to use the equipment dealer’s longstanding upstate New York presence to convince customers it is here to stay.

Longevity is an important selling point because farms and other large-scale energy users are often concerned about renewable-energy companies’ stability, according to Mark Ferrara, CEC Energy project manager. The green-energy industry has been cyclical, and installers going out of business can leave customers searching for someone to service their renewable-energy equipment, he continues.

“It has traditionally been a problem in the industry,” Ferrara says. “What we bring to the industry is we’re going to be here for the next 50 years. We’ve been in business 50 years. We’re going to be here 50 more.”

CEC Energy’s wind-power projects cost between $70,000 and $5 million before state and federal incentives, Ferrara says. The division can install windmills of varying capacity, both over and under 100 kilowatts. A 50-kilowatt turbine normally produces between 100 kilowatt hours and 200 kilowatt hours in a year, enough to power a small- to medium-sized dairy farm, Ferrara adds.

“It’s something to help them reduce energy costs and be more profitable in business,” he says. “Turbines are expensive, but over the next 20 years you’re going to be paying a lot to the utility companies. Where do you want your money to go?”

CEC Energy also recently started offering solar-power equipment. It hasn’t installed any solar projects yet, but will be looking for farms, schools, hospitals, and other large, non-residential users who are interested.

The division works with wind-power manufacturers including Endurance Wind Power, which has its U.S. offices in Utah, Vermont–based Northern Power Systems, and Aeronautica Windpower, LLC of Massachusetts. CEC Energy plans to primarily install products from the solar-power manufacturer Helios Solar Works of Milwaukee.

Ferrara and two other employees make up the CEC Energy division, which is based in Cazenovia Equipment Co.’s new headquarters at 2 Remington Park Drive in Cazenovia. The dealer built that 28,500-square-foot facility after an August 2011 fire decimated its former 16,000-square-foot headquarters up the road at 3200 U.S. Route 20 in Nelson. The Remington Park Drive building opened for business April 9 of this year.

Cazenovia Equipment Co. also operates locations in Chittenango, Cortland, Clinton, Oneonta, LaFayette, Sandy Creek, Lowville, and Watertown. CEC Energy will serve all areas of upstate New York, Ferrara says. But the division has no plans to hire new employees at this time.

“In the upcoming years we are not looking to expand to put in 20 projects per year,” Ferrara says. “We are focusing on a smaller number of very high-quality projects.”

Cazenovia Equipment Co. started CEC Energy in the spring of 2010 after being approached by an initiative known as the Harvest the Wind Network. That network was started by a Kansas John Deere dealership, BTI Inc., to help other John Deere dealers sell and service wind-energy products.

Ferrara declined to share revenue totals and projections for CEC Energy or Cazenovia Equipment Co. But Cazenovia Equipment Co. President and co-owner Michael Frazee told The Central New York Business Journal in August that the company was on pace to generate $80 million in the fiscal year that ended Nov. 1. The business posted revenue of $68 million the year before, he said.

Frazee also shared plans to add 15 employees companywide over a calendar year, which would bring Cazenovia Equipment Co.’s total number of employees to 185. About 40 of those work at its headquarters.

CEC Energy attempts to find new customers by attending state agricultural shows and by hosting wind-power seminars, Ferrara says. Its next showcase is Cazenovia Equipment Co.’s “Drive Green Event” at the New York State Fairgrounds March 22-23.

“We gather people, many of whom have similar questions,” Ferrara says. “And we can really answer many of those questions at the same time.”

Contact Seltzer at rseltzer@cnybj.com

Geneva hair-products maker powers up with windmills

Energy, Environment & Sustainability, Manufacturing & Engineering, Regional News, Small Business, Subscriber Only

GENEVA — Zotos International, Inc. found a way for the wind to blow through its hair-care products. The Geneva–based manufacturer uses a pair of 1.65-megawatt wind turbines to help power its plant at 300 Forge Ave. The 364-foot turbines have been operational for about 12 months, and Zotos hopes to use them to generate as

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GENEVA — Zotos International, Inc. found a way for the wind to blow through its hair-care products.

The Geneva–based manufacturer uses a pair of 1.65-megawatt wind turbines to help power its plant at 300 Forge Ave. The 364-foot turbines have been operational for about 12 months, and Zotos hopes to use them to generate as much as 5 million kilowatt hours a year.

Zotos (zotos.com) makes hair-care and styling-aid products for hair salons and other professionals. Those customers aren’t necessarily buying products solely because they’ve been produced using renewable energy, according to Anthony Perdigao, Zotos’ vice president of operations and chief sustainability officer. However, green techniques help set the company’s offerings apart from the rest of the market, he says.

“We felt it was very important we have a strong sustainability initiative in place to stress our point of difference in the marketplace,” Perdigao says. “We wanted to look at ways of not only reducing our energy demand, but how we can create our own renewable energy on site.”

The windmills will save Zotos between $400,000 and $500,000 a year in energy costs, the company estimates, which is about half of its energy expenses.

Installing the windmills wasn’t an overnight process, according to Perdigao. It took three years to complete the project, including wind mapping, permitting, and installation. The project cost $7.8 million, with 30 percent coming from a grant under the 2009 federal American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (the stimulus legislation). Zotos footed the rest of the cost using its own cash.

The Wheatfield–based engineering firm Plant-IQ, LLC led engineering for the turbines. Hyundai manufactured the windmill equipment, while Siemens produced controls, according to Perdigao.

So far, windmill-power production has been reliable, he says. But Zotos has had to learn the ins and outs of generating its own energy.

“We’re a manufacturer of beauty products and not used to managing utilities and energy production,” Perdigao says. “We have our share of learning curve and optimization curve that we’re going through. I expected that in a project of this magnitude.”

One optimization issue the company is dealing with concerns the amount of power it produces. The plant’s windmills sometimes generate more energy than it uses, and Zotos sends surplus electricity back into the power grid. But it needs to renegotiate its interconnectivity agreement with NYSEG to allow it to sell back more energy, according to Perdigao.

There are also times when the wind turbines don’t produce enough power to run the plant, when Zotos has to tap the electricity grid. The company then purchases renewable-energy credits from Renewable Choice Energy, a Boulder, Colo. firm.

In April 2012, Zotos met a goal it had set of using 100 percent renewable energy by 2013, Perdigao says. The firm also earned a 2012 Green Power Leadership Award from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

About 1,000 people work at Zotos’ Geneva plant, which is 670,000 square feet. Roughly 400 of those employees are full-time workers for Zotos, while the rest are long-term contract employees, Perdigao says. The company added about 30 employees at the site in the last year and will likely continue to grow, he adds, declining to share a specific hiring projection.

The Geneva plant is Zotos’ only facility. The company is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Tokyo–based cosmetics company Shiseido Co., Ltd. Shiseido reported net sales of 333.6 billion yen, or just over $4 billion, in the first two quarters of its current fiscal year that ended Sept. 30. sales were down 0.8 percent from the same period last year.

Perdigao declined to share Zotos-specific revenue totals or growth projections.

Contact Seltzer at rseltzer@cnybj.com

Ithaca clean-tech startup looks to seas for power

Energy, Environment & Sustainability, Health Care, Manufacturing & Engineering, Regional News, Small Business, Subscriber Only

ITHACA — An Ithaca–based clean-tech startup firm, called WavElectric, is developing a power-generation system that focuses on producing electricity using the motion of ocean waves. The company’s technology was developed by Angel Martinez, a senior research technician at Cornell University. The system involves a kinetic-power generator that is activated by movement, says Alessandro Anzani, WavElectric

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ITHACA — An Ithaca–based clean-tech startup firm, called WavElectric, is developing a power-generation system that focuses on producing electricity using the motion of ocean waves.

The company’s technology was developed by Angel Martinez, a senior research technician at Cornell University. The system involves a kinetic-power generator that is activated by movement, says Alessandro Anzani, WavElectric CEO.

The generator is housed inside a floating buoy. Its one moving part is not exposed to sea water or the outside air, Anzani notes.

That makes it more resistant to damage than some other wave power systems.

“They’re exposed to high wear and tear,” Anzani says. “The joints they have eventually fail in marine water. Our generator is sealed at two levels.”

In addition, the generator WavElectric uses activates with any motion, not just movement in a specific direction, Anzani says.

Wave power in general has the potential to be more cost effective and reliable than other renewable sources like solar or wind, he adds. Waves, he notes, are constant.

Even in ideal locations, blowing wind and shining sun are intermittent. Wave power could also be available in more locations than wind and solar, Anzani says.

Initially, the company plans to deploy the system to power marine-monitoring devices. There are about 50,000 buoys floating throughout the world’s oceans, Anzani explains.

They track shipping traffic, water quality, weather, and more. They all run on batteries that need to be replaced regularly.

WavElectric’s systems could integrate with the devices to keep them powered constantly, Anzani says. The firm is already talking with marine monitoring companies about its technology.

“It’s an incredible cost just to keep those batteries charged,” Anzani says.

Eventually, Anzani and Martinez want to scale the system and build offshore arrays that could transmit electricity back to land and even into the power grid, Anzani says. The system’s output can range from a few watts up to several megawatts of power.

WavElectric is working with the Shoals Marine Laboratory in Maine to run five months of ocean deployment and testing for the generator. Shoals is run jointly by Cornell and the University of New Hampshire.

Anzani runs an angel investing firm, Smartup Capital, LLC, which is WavElectric’s initial investor. The company is also working with the Clean Tech Center incubator at the Tech Garden in downtown Syracuse.

WavElectric (www.wavelectric.com) is seeking additional investment now, says Anzani, who received his master’s degree in business administration at Cornell. The firm’s first systems for recharging monitoring devices should be on the market by next summer.

Martinez began developing the system while volunteering in a coastal community in Mexico, Anzani says. The area lacked access to the electric grid so Martinez began working on a way to provide power for the community using the ocean.

Reactor project at Cornell wins DOE funding

Energy, Environment & Sustainability, Health Care, Insurance & Financial Services, Subscriber Only

ITHACA — A research project led by two Cornell University professors aims to create compact reactors used in production of biofuel from algae. Biofuels can be made from a variety of stocks, including corn and wood. As it turns out, algae is especially energy dense, meaning a given amount of algae would produce more fuel

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ITHACA — A research project led by two Cornell University professors aims to create compact reactors used in production of biofuel from algae.

Biofuels can be made from a variety of stocks, including corn and wood. As it turns out, algae is especially energy dense, meaning a given amount of algae would produce more fuel than the same amount of corn, says David Erickson, one of the project’s lead researchers.

The problem is the algae for fuel are typically grown in large pond-like reactors. They use a lot of land and water and require large amounts of energy to produce fuel, explains Erickson, an associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering.

The pond-like reactors are simply not economically viable.

Erickson and Largus Angenent, an associate professor in Cornell’s Department of Biological and Environmental Engineering, are working on a way to change that. The reactor they’re developing would be a 1-meter cube, but yield the same amount of biofuel as a pond measuring 100 meters by 10 meters.

A $910,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Energy is helping the project move forward.

So far, the researchers have demonstrated all the various elements of the reactor separately. The grant will help them bring the system together into a prototype that can be tested and evaluated as a whole.

It will also help them identify the best path to market, Erickson contends. He and Angenent could look to license the technology to another company or commercialize it themselves through a startup business.

The reactor is compact enough that it could be located close to sources of carbon used in biofuel production, Erickson says. Such sites could include power plants and/or chemical production facilities.

The reactor would be especially helpful in environments where outdoor ponds would freeze in the winter, making production at carbon-producing sites more challenging. It would also allow biofuel production in places that don’t have enough space for the large ponds currently used.

Currently, carbon used in biofuel production is transported to the reactor from the source, Erickson notes. The compact reactor he and Angenent are working on could change that.

The researchers are in the process of filing patents to protect their technology. The system works by using unique ways to deliver light, introduce carbon and other nutrients, and extract fuel at the same time, Erickson explains.

The federal grant was one of 66 awarded by the Energy Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency — Energy (ARPA-E). The projects received a total of $130 million through the department’s OPEN 2012 program.

ARPA-E seeks out transformational, breakthrough technologies that show fundamental technical promise, but are too early for private-sector investment, according to the Energy Department. The Cornell project was one of four in New York state to receive a total of $9.5 million in funding.

GE Global Research in Niskayuna, GE Power and Water in Schenectady, and the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in Rensselaer were the other New York winners.

Contact Tampone at ktampone@cnybj.com

ExxonMobil forecast: North America to become net energy exporter by 2025

Energy, Environment & Sustainability, Subscriber Only

Led by technological advances that allow for drilling natural gas and oil in shale and other previously unreachable locations, North America is poised to become a net exporter of energy by 2025. That’s according to a report issued Dec. 11 by energy giant ExxonMobil, entitled: “The Outlook for Energy: A View to 2040.” “Today, North

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New York ranks third in number of certified organic farms

New York News, Subscriber Only

In the growing field of organic farming, New York state ranks third in the country in number of certified farms, according to a new report from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). New York had 597 certified organic farms in 2011, behind California with 1,898, and Wisconsin with 870, the USDA’s New York field office

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First Niagara names new CMO

Banks & Credit Unions

First Niagara Financial Group, Inc. (NASDAQ: FNFG) has a new chief marketing officer. The Buffalo–based banking company announced Avi Patel’s promotion to the post today.

Utica College to expand online programs

Health Care, Technology

UTICA — Utica College is leasing space in the Harza Building in downtown Utica to expand its online division and reach out to new students

BlueRock Energy starts price index for CNY electricity

Energy, Environment & Sustainability

SYRACUSE — BlueRock Energy, Inc. is publishing a new index it says will allow businesses to compare wholesale electricity prices with those on their energy

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