Innovator in the Spotlight

Towards a more inclusive society to raise awareness of basic skills gaps

In the Netherlands, 2.5 million people struggle daily with reading, writing, math, and digital skills, also called basic skills. These deficiencies make it difficult for them to fully participate in society, such as reading and understanding a letter or buying a train ticket, leading to various personal and societal problems.

November’s Impactful Innovations Webinar

On Thursday 12 November, the fourth Impactful Innovation webinar for our internal community took place hosted by Judith Tesser and co-hosted by Joris Dufils. The goal of the webinar was to actively work towards cross-project group interactions not only by sharing challenges and innovations but also by continuing to challenge ourselves in order to generate more impact with our projects.

PerStim & IntelLight+ Projects

Judith Tesser
Judith Tesser, host of the 4th webinar Impactful Innovations

Rob Mestrom and Steven Beumer (PerStim) and Harold Weffers (IntelLight+) shared their stories of how they are working on meaningful, impactful innovations. In the PerStim project, which stands for Personalized Neurostimulation, Rob, Steven and their team are investigating how treatments for individuals with specific forms of epilepsy can be personalized effectively using a non-invasive approach in order to improve quality of life for these patients. Light plays an important role when looking at quality of life, as we learned from the second talk by Harold, coordinator of the IntelLight+ project. Harold explained how human-centric lighting could benefit us all through the development of algorithms for inferring and even predicting user context in order to accommodate user needs and preferences. Other aspects include innovative lighting and new design methodologies.

Through the sharing of knowledge during these webinars, we are seeing the first unexpected crossovers arise – the key to unleashing our collective intelligence! Thanks to our speakers, Rob, Steven and Harold!