From Sensors to Solutions with Midé Technology

Chris Ludlow spends his time helping customers understand what really happens to critical assets in the field.

Data with purpose

As Chief Growth Officer at Midé Technology, part of Hutchinson, Mr. Ludlow oversees innovation at the intersection of sensing, data, and some of the world's most demanding engineering environments. Their customers span aerospace, defense, transportation, and industrial sectors, where understanding exactly what a critical asset experiences in the field can mean the difference between operational confidence and costly failures.

The company itself has undergone a significant evolution. Founded as an MIT spinout in the early 1990s, Midé built a reputation for developing advanced technologies and bringing them to market. Its relationship with Hutchinson began more than a decade ago, initially through instrumentation work on helicopter components, before it eventually led to acquisition in 2019.

Today, the organization serves as Hutchinson's Research and Innovation hub for North America, bringing their sensing, intelligence, and data-driven capabilities into a business already known for its expertise in materials, vibration isolation, sealing technologies, and engineered systems.

Midé’s success in supporting customers at the cutting edge of connected technologies is fueled by a team who are keen to pursue ‘what’s possible’.

"I think our type of work does tend to bring in a certain type of person,” says Ludlow. “People that like change and those that enjoy every day being a little bit different are often more comfortable with risk, and more comfortable with failure. They're willing to power through that and get to the solution eventually, even if it doesn't go in the most direct route."

It's a mindset that seems particularly suited to industrial IoT.

While many IoT manufacturers focus on scale and mass-market deployment, Midé operates in a different space for clients with particularly niche challenges. The company's work combines the capture of high-fidelity data on high-value assets with the Hutchinson Group’s expertise (for thermal, sealing, NVH (Noise, Vibration, and Harshness), etc.), to deliver tailored solutions that solve clear business problems.

"Our clients really want to understand what's happening to their asset to an incredible degree of accuracy," Ludlow says. "To really understand, at least mechanically, how an asset is performing and what its state of health is, you have to capture an awful lot of data."

That means looking beyond individual measurements and toward a richer picture of reality. Acceleration, temperature, humidity, pressure, gyroscopic data, and other signals all contribute to a more complete understanding of how an asset behaves during transportation, operation, or exposure to extreme conditions.

Collecting the data, however, is only the first step.

"You have all this information, but do you actually have the physics-based expertise to be able to extract key insights from it?" Ludlow asks.

That focus on meaningful analysis rather than raw information reflects a broader shift taking place across industrial IoT. Increasingly, organizations are discovering that value comes not from gathering more data, but from gathering the right data and understanding what it means.

Perhaps nowhere is that more apparent than in the gap between laboratory testing and the real world.

Many critical systems are validated against established standards before deployment. Yet, as Ludlow points out, the real world rarely behaves exactly as expected.

"You just can't test in a laboratory setting for every single scenario," he says. “Some of our customers discovered that assets performing flawlessly during qualification testing would still experience issues once transported or deployed in operating environments. The real world is quite a bit different than what they're validating their designs to.”

That challenge has become a defining theme of Midé's work, and it also played an unexpected role in the creation of one of the company's most successful innovations: enDAQ.

The making of enDAQ

The story of enDAQ begins not in a laboratory, but underneath a train.

At the time, the Midé team was working on vibration energy harvesting systems and needed accurate vibration data from customer environments. Capturing that information required hauling expensive equipment into the field to conduct testing.

Ludlow remembers one project vividly

"We've got probably $10,000 to $20,000 worth of equipment including a Honda power generator, and we’re going under trains in the middle of the night, all to capture about a minute's worth of data,” he recalls. "I hit my head on the train brake beam! I think I said something not very nice, and I said ‘there’s got to be an easier way to do this."

An electrical engineer on the team, whom Ludlow describes as ‘something of a genius’, responded that he could probably embed everything needed for data capture into a single box. That idea became the foundation for what would eventually evolve into enDAQ.

Originally launched as a vibration data logger, the platform has steadily expanded in capability through iterative changes. Today it incorporates multiple embedded sensors, wireless connectivity, and increasingly sophisticated edge-processing capabilities. Capturing such diverse, high-fidelity data requires significant power, so the W8 models are equipped with a rechargeable Saft MP battery. The battery powers the device for the duration of a shipment (often up to a week) before being recharged for its next adventure.

The applications are remarkably diverse.

happens to satellites, data center hardware, or critical nuclear reactor components during transportation. One museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico, even uses it to monitor valuable artwork while it travels between locations.

"We've sold to just about every market," Ludlow says. "We've sold to Tesla, Google, Apple - but we've also sold to a guy who had a noisy neighbor and he simply wanted to measure vibrations through a shared wall.”

That versatility points toward where industrial IoT may be heading next. Increasingly, customers are looking beyond standalone devices and toward complete solutions that combine sensing, connectivity, analysis, and business outcomes.

"The build-it-yourself approach is a lot to ask," Ludlow says. "If a company can come in and solve a real problem that you have, with a good ROI, that's where companies are going to go."

For Midé, that means moving further into data services, edge computing, and integrated solutions capable of delivering insights without overwhelming customers with vast quantities of raw information.

The objective, though, remains the same as it was underneath that train years ago: make it easier for customers (and sore-headed engineers) to understand what's really happening to the most critical assets.