A WEB tool for identifying and monitoring technology trends

Abstract

In this paper we present a new WEB-based tool which allow the observation, analysis and identification of possible opportunities and threats on technological trends. For this purpose, we insert a new index, named for us as TW-Index-this name was given in reference to the term Technology Watch, which is a technique for technological forecasting called Monitoring and Intelligence Systems. The purpose of TW-Index is to provide the user the capacity of monitoring and identifying whether certain terms which are used for defining a technology or research are currently been searched and used in the Internet. For this, we used as a basis the Google Trends. So, in this paper we present three contributions: (i) the concept of the TW-index, (ii) a WEB-based system for measuring the impact of certain technology or research using their keywords, which are quantified using our TW-Index, and (iii) the analysis of patents deposited from UFS (Federal University of Sergipe, Brazil), from 1998 until 2014, which were studied using our TW-Index. These patents were classified into three areas of knowledge-Engineering and Sciences, Agrarian and Food Technology, and Health area. To use this software, can make a download and install it, using the code available in Moreno (2020).