Tulsa spin-out hits the road

Tulsa University is spinning out Synercon, a company that will commercialise technology which extracts crash data from a vehicle’s engine control module. Jeremy Daily, associate professor and developer of the so-called Forensic Link Adapter, will take a one year sabbatical to build the company.

Synercon’s business development was made possible under a federal cooperative agreement with the US National Institute of Justice. It has secured a first contract with the Oklahoma Highway Patrol.

Large commercial trucks are already equipped with a similar technology, called heavy vehicle event data recorders (hvEdr). They store data such as speeds, time driven, brake status and diagnostic trouble codes. They are, in essence, the black box equivalent for vehicles. Synercon’s technology is fully compatible and can extract data from an hvEdr.

While not exactly a first for Tulsa University, this spin-out does signal an important milestone for the small university that only really started thinking about tech transfers about a decade ago. The university’s portfolio is currently limited at about 20 patents, a number that is growing and the university hopes to expand significantly over the coming years.

Bill Lawson, director of Tulsa’s technology transfer office, is hoping that more biomedical research will help the university reach its goal of increasing commercialisation. He said: “We are starting to get involved more in that area, and we are moving in that direction and cooperating with Oklahoma University on a community medicine programme in Tulsa. Every university has a goal to share the fruits of intellectual endeavours with the larger community and benefit society, and the way you do that is to commercialise it so somebody can buy it.”