Low Literacy project

Within the Emergence Lab at Eindhoven Engine, I am doing my research project around low literacy. More specifically, I am looking to identify the touchpoints that helped people who have had low literacy to overcome the difficulty they have in reading and writing. These touchpoints can then form the basis for future design interventions that can either stimulate or lower the threshold for people to work on their low literacy.

Improving quality of life

I have chosen this project because, as a designer, I want to improve quality of life. Since reading and writing is so very important today, I wanted to take up the challenge of low literacy. I hope to lay the foundations for future design interventions in such a way that these interventions are tailored to the wishes and needs of the people they are designed for.

The Festival of Disruption was a full day of inspiration, innovations and positive energy. Throughout the day, we showed our way of working and the latest developments of our innovation projects. We can look back on a very successful day.

Did you miss out on the festival or do you want to relive the day?

Together with the shareholders of Eindhoven Engine (TU/e, TNO and Fontys) and the Supervisory Board, we will ensure a fitting succession. Until the full management team of Eindhoven Engine is operational again, Maarten Steinbuch will be your contact person.

We are proud of the results achieved so far with Eindhoven Engine and how it has become embedded within the ecosystem. We are especially grateful to Katja for her important contribution to this: she has been a major factor in building up the organization, inspiring our team and engaging all shareholders in an outstanding manner. As Eindhoven Engine, we have an important role to play in our ecosystem, which we do with full responsibility and with the energy and vigor of our motivated team.

We are glad that Katja remains at the heart of our Brainport region. If you personally want to reach out to Katja, you can send her a message at katja.pahnke@prodrive-technologies.com. She will appreciate it!

Stricter regulations

Air handling units (AHUs) are highly customized equipment. The regulations concerning AHUs are becoming increasingly strict to meet higher energy efficiency and ventilation goals, which adds to the complexity inherent within customized equipment. This upsurge in complexity increases the need for the continuous maintenance and monitoring of AHUs. However, such programs are difficult to implement due to the shortage of skilled personnel. Therefore, continuous monitoring and fault detection and diagnosis (FDD) processes need to be automated, which is referred to as AFDD. Despite the plethora of research on AFDD, there are limited real-life applications. Adding to this, the available solutions are either unreliable, unaffordable and/or unscalable.

FDD tools

A survey of the literature on FDD tools (commercially deployed or under development) revealed that these tools rely on a combination of expert rules or first principles. These approaches are inherently reliant on sensed information and/or expert knowledge, which makes their sustainment untenable post-deployment. Moreover, such tools have a very limited ability to prevent significant energy wastage. It is estimated that up to 30% of energy could be saved by effectively using data collected with continuous monitoring systems.

Artificial Intelligence

To realize this potential, highly sensitive fault diagnosis models can be trained with Artificial Intelligence (AI) based approaches that are scalable and have less reliance on expert knowledge and sensors. Through this project, an AFDD tool that incorporates these approaches has been developed and tested at two buildings. Within the AI domain, gradient boosting techniques have been employed for fault detection and its diagnosis is handled using Bayesian networks. Through experimental validation, a diagnosis specificity exceeding 90% has been realized. Importantly, it has been observed that the prototyped AFDD tool could reduce the energy consumed in the deployed chiller by 33%.

*Continuous Monitoring and Fault Detection Diagnosis of large Heat Ventilation and Air Conditioning systems.

We are proud of the results achieved so far with Eindhoven Engine and how it has become embedded within the ecosystem. We are especially grateful to Katja for her important contribution in this: she has been a major factor in building up the organization, inspiring our team and engaging all shareholders in an outstanding manner. As Eindhoven Engine, we have an important role to play in our ecosystem, which we do so with full responsibility and with the energy and vigor of our motivated team.

On behalf of Eindhoven Engine BV,

Maarten Steinbuch (scientific director)
Bert Pauli (chair of the Supervisory Board)

Eindhoven Engine and the TU/e department Industrial Design is offering a fully funded 2-year position to master graduates leading to the award of an EngD (Engineering Doctorate) degree in Designing Human- System Interaction. Start date: as soon as possible.

About the assignment

In this assignment you contribute to a deeper understanding and the design of a few meaningful interventions, addressing the huge societal challenge of non-inclusiveness. In particular, while the Brainport region is a highly intellectual region, at the same time 15% of the population is low literate, which excludes them from part of the possibilities available in the region. With that purpose in mind, Eindhoven Engine will bring together an ecosystem of students, researchers, start-ups and corporates to co-create, in an open innovation mindset, meaningful technology-based solutions with a strong human dimension. Are you creative, innovative and open minded? You are someone who can take responsibility for steering the ecosystem and leading the design of the possible solutions, for instance with student teams? For you no roads are impossible, as long as the impact is clear and it contributes to a solution of a real problem? ​For obvious reasons we require  a B2 level of the Dutch language. 

Do you have questions about this traineeship? You can also contact Walter Baets, Learning Officer @ Eindhoven Engine, via w.r.j.baets@tue.nl or Lotte Geertsen, Project Leader Emergence Lab @ Eindhoven Engine, via c.h.e.geertsen@tue.nl

Eindhoven Engine and the TU/e department Industrial Design is offering a fully funded 2-year position to master graduates leading to the award of an EngD (Engineering Doctorate) degree in Designing Human- System Interaction. Start date: as soon as possible.

About the assignment

In this assignment you contribute to a deeper understanding and the design of a number of meaningful interventions, addressing the huge societal challenge of the Future of Work. Are you creative, innovative and open minded? You are someone who can take responsibility for steering the ecosystem and leading the design of the possible solutions, for instance with student teams? And for you no roads are impossible, as long as the impact is clear and it contributes to a solution of a real problem?

Do you have questions about this traineeship? You can also contact Walter Baets, Learning Officer @ Eindhoven Engine, via w.r.j.baets@tue.nl or Lotte Geertsen, Project Leader Emergence Lab @ Eindhoven Engine, via c.h.e.geertsen@tue.nl

Challenges

• ‘How can you help people with MS manage a healthy lifestyle?’
  Provided by De Tolbrug, an expertise center for rehabilitation in north-east Brabant.

• ‘How can we take advantage of data about behavior, health and households to help less self-reliant people?’
  Provided by Tzorg, an organization that provides home care.
  

• ‘How to keep the social network strong for elderly people and help with isolation in general?’
  Provided by Fontys Verpleegkunde.

Reconceptualizing education

“There are two sides to what I do,” begins Dimitri. “One is that I help the office team with a combination of technical learning and social innovation. Second is making the connection between Fontys and everything Eindhoven Engine does – not just the technical engineering but all the disciplines.”

This is an area in which Dimitri has deep experience, having spent 15 years at Avans University of Applied Sciences. There, he developed innovative education in which the research questions of companies in Eindhoven’s high-tech industry formed the basis for the learning experience. Practice-oriented research in a joint learning environment was used as a vehicle to link education to companies and, in this co-creation, knowledge sharing was stimulated and innovation processes were accelerated. With a focus on smart industry and data science, this led to novel concepts such as the reconceptualization of teachers as coaches that help students create their own learning experiences in industry-led projects and challenges.

“More and more students from Fontys are getting involved with Eindhoven Engine

and it’s great to see.”

Dimitri van de Kelft, Liaison Manager Fontys at Eindhoven Engine

“That was seen by Fontys and they found me an interesting candidate for the position of research manager for the Centre of Expertise High Tech Systems & Materials,” Dimitri continues. “The great thing about my new position is that I now also act as a liaison for Eindhoven Engine on behalf of Fontys. It felt like a homecoming! Here, people look at the world not as it is but at how they can change it.”

Reaching further out

In terms of what Fontys and Eindhoven Engine mean to one another, Dimitri emphasizes interdisciplinarity and co-creation – after all, fundamental knowledge from technical universities such as Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) has no hope of reaching society unless it can applied. “Eindhoven Engine attracts all kinds of students from Fontys and we form an innovation accelerator for start-ups and (SME) companies. Fontys therefore has a bigger impact,” says Dimitri. “More people understand that technical universities should work with universities of applied science, which is very different to just a few years ago.”

As an example, Dimitri looks to the recent Hack2Impact Health@Home hackathon that brought together Eindhoven Engine, Fontys, TU/e and MIT Hacking Medicine to generate solutions for healthcare and industry. “It was a really inspiring group: students who didn’t know each other but worked together constructively and positively,” he smiles. “More and more students from Fontys are getting involved with Eindhoven Engine and it’s great to see.”

Sustainability is high on Dimitri’s agenda for future innovation. He is therefore very interested in the projects at Eindhoven Engine, such as on circular food packaging and air quality. “At Fontys, I’m now looking for parties with whom we can connect in the field of battery recycling. Perhaps a nice connection with Eindhoven Engine can be created for this special challenge,” he concludes. “After a few months here, I see their vision and the way they’re evolving. The most important thing is an impact for both society and the university. And I want to participate in making this even bigger.”