Title Promoter Affiliations Abstract "Cognitive assessment platform (CAP): Capturing physiological interaction parameters of caregivers during stressful ICU interventions, towards the development of dynamic caregivers' assistant interfaces (CAI)." "Kristof Vaes, Guido De Bruyne" "Laboratory Experimental Medicine and Pediatrics (LEMP), Product development" "An intensive care unit (ICU) is a safety critical environment where caregivers' activities are crucial to human lives. Adverse events, defined as injuries or complications that are provoked by a medical human error rather than the patient's underlying disease, occur in about one-third of cases in adult ICU patients and the risk of error is cumulative. The risk factors of adverse events include high nursing workload, caregivers' sleep deprivation or fatigue, communication failure, a high patient-to-nurse ratio and poor management. Work-related stress with the accompanying emotions provoked specifically in ICU is well documented. Nonetheless, only few studies have utilized physiological measures regarding research conducted on stress on medical caregivers.Within this project, it is aimed to develop a cognitive assessment platform (CAP) which comprises wearable sensors to enable monitoring of physiological parameters and location in real-time of caregivers within an ICU. This allows creating cognitive states of caregivers, linked to time and place. Workload, fatigue and stress are the monitored cognitive states, as they are the most significant threats towards patient safety. This innovative approach will allow us to correlate the cognitive states of caregivers with specific locations at the ICU, TISS-28, tasks and episodes during their working day and night, which will provide new insights and better understanding of the workflow of the ICU caregivers. Ultimately, this research may provide rich opportunities for examination and discovery in optimising the workflow of ICU caregivers." "The development of a toolkit for high school pupils of the 2nd grade to gain hands-on experience in practice about the scientific theory taught in the science & math classes. The toolkit support both teachers & students to engage in STEM-education" "Sarah Rohaert" "Product development" "Development of a building kit, tailor-made for 4th year ASO students (possibly TSO), around energy, as part of the Energy Wizard project by multidisciplinary teams of international students who participate in the European Project Semester at the Product Development department of the UAntwerp, . The building kit contains e.g. a kind of water mill in which 'water energy' is converted into kinetic energy. A professor and students in training as science teachers at the Antwerp School of Education provide input based on their insights into the curriculum and the knowledge to be acquired for the intended target group (second grade ASO)." "Economic Assessment of Demand Response Programs - A behavioural approach." "Engineering Management" "Low carbon energy and energy efficiency is essential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The use of decentralised (low-carbon) energy systems, with greater participation of consumers in demand management, is a necessary component of the future energy mix. The extent of consumer adoption of Demand Respons (DR) depends primarily on the availability of suitable technologies, the levels and relevance of information, tariff design and the impacts of all these on their expenditure budgets. In this research, the exploration would be on the design of mechanisms that would maximise the demand response of urban residential and commercial consumers to economic incentives, so as to ensure the same reliability and confidence in renewable energy-dominant grids as compared to the conventional grids." "Virtual thermal and Virtueel thermisch en biomechanisch hoofdmodel om lokaal (dis)comfort te kwantificeren (vir-head) head model to quantify local (dis)comfort (vir-head)." "Guido De Bruyne" "Product development" "This research aims at developing the methodological basis of a virtual thermal and biomechanical head model (vir-head). The model will allow designing head mounted products for thermal and physical comfort through insight in local pressure accumulation and local thermal responses on the head." "3D sonar for electric wheelchairs - proof of concept." "Jan Steckel" "Engineering Management" "This project, supported by the Swedish Promobilia Foundation, tests the feasibility of a 3D sonar system on electric wheelchairs. The goal of the project is to implement different algorithms which support the user of the wheelchair using environmental information generated by the sonar sensor. This could be used to implement for example obstacle avoidance behaviour." "Risk based soil reclamation in the Kempen through the reduction of the mobility and bioavailability of heavy metals in the soil." "Kristin ADRIAENSEN" "Environmental Biology" "In situ immobilization of metals, using metal immobilized soil additives, is a potential remediation strategy for metal polluted soils. Various mechanisms such as sorption and (co) precipitationreactions, induced by adding an additive to the soil may cause a reduction of the bioavailability of metals and hence the risks associated with contamination. Mainly for large-scale diffuse pollution, as in the Belgian (and Dutch) Kempen, this technique, by its relatively low cost and little significant impact on the environment, is an attractive option. Many different products have been investigated as potential soil additives in this context, but compare the efficiency of the different soil additives through the numerous studies on metalimmobilization, thus achieving a selection of 'the best' additive or coming to a ranking by increasing immobilizationcapacity is not obvious or even impossible. This difficulty is mainly due to the fact that different research groups often use different assessment methods, but it appears that the effect of soil additives is also soil dependent. A thorough literature study thus provides no ready solution for the 700 cunic metres of contaminated soils in the Kempen. The project seeks a risk-based soil in the Kempen, based on the reduction of the mobility and bioavailability of heavy metals in the soil. The project comprises 2 components: (i) the development of an optimized and standardized evaluation protocol with a physicochemical (UGent), environmental organic (UHasselt) and exotoxicological component(PHL), and (ii) the suitability ananlysis of a number of potential metal immobilized soil additives and their commercialization .Finally results from this study are checked against the principles of risk-based remediation in close consultation with OVAM."