STARKVILLE — When it comes to inventions, most people think of the wheel or a lightbulb. Few people know what an osteometric device is.
But archaeologists and anthropologists everywhere will soon have the chance to benefit from Mississippi State University graduate student Eric Anderson’s invention, which he recently was awarded $50,000 to advance development.
Anderson’s Portable Osteometric Device is an improvement on the standard osteometric device scientists and researchers use to measure bones. His uses lasers and offers a more accurate reading as opposed to users having to read an analog measurement.
“The POD is based off of the osteometric board, which hasn’t really changed since the 19th century,” Anderson said. “The osteometric board is basically a board and ruler with two panels. You put a bone in between the panels and you smush them together, and it gives you the bone length.”
The board is used by researchers to determine bone length, which can be an indicator for a variety of things including stature, growth and development patterns and sex. Considering all the things the device is used for, Anderson was shocked that a modernized version of the device hadn’t been invented, to his knowledge.
“I decided to try to remake it, make something more modern for the new researcher. I looked into everything from velcro to magnets — I was all over the place. My house looked like it was the nutty professor and I was trying to figure out something,” he said. “Finally I was at Home Depot, and I came across one of those laser measuring devices. And I was like, ‘Oh my God, this is perfect. This is exactly what I can do. I can make this.’”
Anderson’s invention looks similar to the osteometric board, but it uses a laser on one of the panels. In a matter of seconds, the device will take 20 readings and average them to give the researcher an accurate measurement.
Anderson and fellow graduate student in the MSU Department of Anthropology and Middle Eastern Cultures Sierra Malis have created a company called Advanced Research Collection Technologies LLC. Through this business they look forward to making more instruments that are not only technologically advanced, but reliable and affordable as such tools tend to be expensive.
Recently, Anderson secured $50,000 through the Strengthening Mississippi Academic Research Through Business Act. The SMART money will be used to develop a companion ARC Tech app to Anderson’s device that will streamline data entry for users of the POD.
The company is a startup aided by the MSU Center for Entrepreneurship and Outreach, helping Anderson secure the SMART funds as well as a provisional patent and about $2,000 toward designing the device.
“Eric Anderson is awesome,” said Eric Hill, entrepreneurship director for the center. “He’s the consummate individual who saw a problem in the marketplace in the field of research he’s in and has developed a solution that will help that and it has global implications. That’s exactly the kind of thing that we like to help and see MSU students do.”
The SMART Business Act is two pronged as Jeremy Clay, director of the MSU Office of Technology Management, explained to The Dispatch. Anderson is benefitting from the SMART Business Accelerate Initiative portion of the 2013 Mississippi state legislation.
“It’s proof of concept funding,” Clay said. “And the idea is to take an invention that is coming out of a university closer to market so that we can commercialize it in ways that benefit society.”
Currently, Anderson is in Poland teaching what he loves — archaeology and anthropology — to students there. But upon his return he looks forward to moving forward with the POD and its associated app.
“Our goal by the end of this year is to have it ready to kind of roll out. The next step is going to be sending out to potential customers to have it tested to see if they have any ideas or what they think about the product itself. So we can have this be the best thing out there for the customer,” he said. “Moving forward from there I would have to say, continuously making the POD better, and making research more reliable, faster, and making research a lot less of a pain for the researcher.”
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