In Europe, the future climate predictions point towards a more frequent occurrence of severe, short and very local rain storms. In cities, with dense urbanisation and infrastructure (port, airport, highways, …), this shall lead to more frequent activities disruptions at street level. Insurers already report that weather-related natural threat and catastrophes are rising rapidly. It...
Infrared (IR) or thermal imaging sensors, traditionally used in defence, are increasingly being introduced in civilian sectors with the rise of new commercial and high volume markets such as automotive, surveillance, thermography, medical diagnosis, environmental sensing and IR imaging in smartphones. The market size in 2018 is around 1M units for the civil market and...
The field of optogenetics is a relatively young discipline in the research field of biology investigating possibilities to remotely control genetically modified cells with visible light. This is achieved by the reversible control of isolated signalling components. Optogenetic proteins have the property to change their conformation and affinity upon illumination with light of a specific...
The high speed cameras make it possible to acquire a fast single event at a fast frame rate and to observe it at a reduced frame rate, the so called “slow motion”. They find many applications in motion analysis, explosives, ballistic, bio-mechanics research, crash test, manufacturing, production line monitoring, deformation, droplet formation, fluid dynamics, particle,...
Vitestro and Result laboratory are developing a device that will automate venous blood sampling. Automation of blood collection offers a great opportunity for improving patient care and reducing costs. A major challenge in development of the venipuncture device is prevention of unintended nerve and arterial puncture, which can be problematic because of anatomical variations. In...
When cutting away sick tissue, surgeons meantime must correctly identify vital anatomical structures such as nerves, lymphatic tissue and blood vessels to prevent accidental damage to these structures. Identifying these to prevent damage remains enormously challenging, especially due to natural differences between individual human bodies. High tech imaging techniques are truly a break through aid...
The Internet of Things (IoT) is defined as a network of nodes able to monitor physical and chemical magnitudes and provide relevant information concerning safety of individuals and goods. This involves continuous monitoring to assess that a safety-relevant magnitude has not reached an alarming threshold value. Stable and reliable power sources are key factors to...
III-Nitride semiconductors (GaN, InN, AlN and their alloys) know an extremely rapid and extensive development in electronics and optoelectronics where lighting represents the first application. White LED lighting systems are based on indirect phosphor photoluminescence with nitride LED as an exciting source, although nitride materials offer theoretically the unique potential of a direct electroluminescence at...
SUGAR’s objective is the development of an augmented reality (AR) system for minimally-invasive robotic-assisted spinal surgeries. It is agreed that AR has potential to foster the adoption of minimally invasive surgery (MIS), but it suffers from technical problems for which no suitable solutions exist: insufficient tracking precision, complex workflows, low framerates and lack of visualisation...
Ion pollution in water causes a wide range of environmental and health problems across the world, including throughout Europe. The extent of the problem is growing, and there is, therefore, an urgent need to develop practical strategies to mitigate this pollution. This project will the latest advances in nanotechnology, to develop a new system to...
The goal of the proposed project is to develop a differential mobility spectrometry-based technology for label-free molecular imaging and to pilot its applications in biological tissue analysis. Successful project would lay the foundation for widespread use of label-free molecular imaging that would revolutionise analysis of tissues by allowing large-scale adoption and realise unforeseen applications also outside the medical area....
Hardware trojans (HT) impact our everyday life and may even cause life threatening situations. Unlike other errors and malfunctions, Trojans are inserted deliberately. Apart from insider attacks, the economically driven outsourcing of production steps to third party contractors enlarges the attack surface dramatically. Ideally, any undesired modification made to an IC should be detectable by presilicon verification/simulation and post-silicon...
Displays components consume the most power in electronic devices such as smartphones. Portable devices usually convert electricity into light to show images and videos, which spends much energy. Alternatively, reflective-type displays in e-book readers consume little power but cannot provide colourful images nor fast frame rates to reproduce videos. Standard technologies cannot meet the requirements for virtual reality...
Hyperspectral Imaging (HSI) is powerful technology that facilitates comprehensive analysis of chemical and biological properties of Earth surface on a large scale, with proven applications in environmental monitoring, farming, forestry, mining and water quality management. In the context of industrial agriculture, HSI allows for data-driven optimisation of cultivation practices, giving dramatic reduction in use of water, fertilisers and crop...
A high-resolution low-cost time-to-digital converter (TDC) technique has been developed utilising low-cost off-the-shelf field programmable gate array (FPGA) technology. This TDC allows for the measurement of events to picosecond accuracies across many channels. A resolution of 1ps, an accuracy of 12ps RMS (single channel) and differential and integral nonlinearity figures of <±1 have been demonstrated, far...
The RAMANTIS project aims to develop a unique system capable of ‘seeing’ the chemical composition of materials and biological tissues. Raman spectroscopy is a ubiquitous technique for material inspection, offering accurate and non-destructive identification of the composition of samples. Raman imaging (RI) applies this technique to extended two-dimensional samples. Current RI systems require scanning times of seconds to even...
Blood gas measurements are a vital tool in monitoring the health of prematurely born children. About three quarters of all patients in neonatal intensive care units are monitored in this way to prevent morbidity and mortality, particularly from hyperoxia and hypoxia. However, current methods and technology suffer from major problems in both handling and reliability, which in the...
Brain tumor surgery presents complex challenges due to a delicate tradeoff between removing as much neoplastic tissue as possible while minimising the loss of brain function. This is usually obtained using intraoperative direct cortical stimulation (DCS) which is considered the gold standard technique for functional mapping of the cortex. Nevertheless, DCS may trigger seizures and can only be...
Project ThermoQuant will develop innovative, high-performance sensors for nanoscale thermal sensing and imaging. The ultimate goal is a breakthrough in nanoscale thermal sensing and a thermal imaging technology with sensitivities in the K/Hz½-range and spatial resolutions down to 10 nm. For this, the consortium partners will explore solid-state electronic spins in diamond as nanoscale temperature sensors. The accuracy targeted...
Recent anatomical studies on macaque brains have revealed that 80% of the network connectivity occurs at the millimetre/centimetre, i.e. mesoscopic, scale, within brain areas (Markov). However, due to technical limitations, this scale remains by far the less studied (Chemla et al 2017). Most neuronal recording techniques are indeed restricted to microscopic (neuron, intra/extracellular recordings) or macroscopic scales (whole brain)....
