Dielectric elastomer transducers (DET) exhibit a strain-stress behavior comparable to human tissues. During my PhD thesis I have demonstrated DE actuators based on elastomer layers several hundred nanometers thin generating 6 % strain applying voltag ...
Malaria remains one of the predominant causes of death in low income countries. Effective diagnostics is the key to eradicate the disease completely. For example, highly-sensitive techniques for malaria parasite detection are needed to test entire po ...
Cell phones and small devices with radio communication interfaces are ubiquitous nowadays. In recent decades, unprecedented growth has been observed in this area, and with the emergence of the new mobile communications standard 5G and the "Internet o ...
Fatty acids (FA) are known to be one of the major storage forms of carbon in living organisms, which are precursors for some plant hormones such as jasmonate (JA) and major building compounds of the membrane bilayer. During my PHD, I identified a new ...
Developing technologies that stop climate change and the negative environmental impact of human activity is one of humanities key challenges in the 21st century. Better separation processes are a key lever for better wastewater treatment, reduction o ...
Nextep ambitions to democratise high performance solutions for people with reduced mobility worldwide.Nextep is a B2B2C medtech project initiated at the School of Business and Engineering Vaud (HEIG-VD) in Yverdon-les-Bains (CH) in February 2016 by K ...
Hemorrhagic stroke - acute bleeding in the brain - is very destructive with over 50% mortality and 80% severe disability rate. It affects globally over half a million individuals yearly, predominantly those between 30 and 65 of age. The leading cause ...
L'objectif principal de ce projet est de mettre au point une formulation qui puisse être utilisée pour la conception d’un implant bioactif, dont le mode d’action principal est celui d’un agent gonflant injectable.Il doit permettre de régén ...
To facilitate drug discovery and biomedical research, we propose KaleiBox, a three-dimensional optical imaging device for small animal imaging. The KaleiBox solution consists of customized software, STIFT (smart toolkit for fluorescence tomography) a ...
The ophthalmic disease age-related macular degeneration is the most prominent cause of blindness in industrialized countries. This, as well as other chronic ocular diseases, are currently treated by manually injecting a drug intravitreally (into the ...
Otzi++ is a software specifically designed to support Law Enforcement officers during preliminary investigations. It is an integrated and scalable tool implemented in Python, gathering several speech processing functions indispensable for speeding up ...
The POWER Project aims to develop a new generation of solar cells by combining emerging perovskite cells with market-proven CIGS and crystalline silicon cells. By combining scientific excellence with innovation and production oriented development, th ...
etc.
Biosimo chemicals, named after the Greek word for «sustainable», aims to make all synthetic products eco-friendly by supplying product manufacturers with bio-based source chemicals. These bio-based chemicals are identical to their existing fossil a ...
The Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) is a widely used molecular technique to make millions of copy of a DNA sample, with applications in a variety of fields such as medical diagnostics, biotechnology and forensic sciences.During the course of this Bri ...
The most promising option to reduce the CO2 emission in Switzerland (46 million tonCO2 emission at 2019 accounting for 1.6% of European union and 0.1% of global emissions) is utilization of post-combustion carbon capture units that can be retrofitted ...
This CTI Bridge PoC grant will be used to prepare the incorporation of a startup company focusing on disrupting the Computer Assisted Engineering (CAE) and Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) markets (respectively $5.8B and $1.8B by 2021) with Artific ...
Mechanical Engineering
SoHHytec aims at manufacturing a co-generation system for the onsite cost-effective generation of hydrogen, electricity, and heat using an innovative technology based on our novel integrated photo-electrochemical device (Patent no. PCT/IB2017/055019) ...
Mechanical Engineering
Corrosion of the steel reinforcement is one of the most widespread degradation mechanisms in reinforced concrete structures. The number of structures needing repair is expected to strongly increase in the next years in all industrialised countries, c ...
The generation of random numbers plays a crucial role in many applications in science and technology, in particular for simulation and cryptography. It is of fundamental importance that the generated numbers are truly random, as any deviation may jeo ...
Within our proposed development we will optimize the fabrication of the fiber microresonator design developed at CSEM for commercial use and develop an in-line optical channel generator and frequency comb source based on this microresonator technolog ...
Photonic integrated circuits (PIC), i.e. photonic waveguide technology fabricated via established semiconductor processing, have within a timeframe of about 15 years, transitioned from research into commercial applications, such as optical datacenter ...
The analysis of materials is a key element for quality control and properties characterization in medical, electronic and photonic industry. Currently, fluorescence imaging, electron microscopy and micro-photoluminescence studies are the most common ...
Optical frequency combs are essentially a combination of millions of lasers with different colors, propagating all together. They look like the teeth of a 'comb', each representing a frequency, hence the name 'Frequency comb'. The first demonstration ...
The applicant, Daniel Schmitter, has invented augmented CAD, a powerful technology for computer-aided design (CAD) and computer-aided engineering (CAE). Augmented CAD simulates real-world physical contact during the 3D digital modeling process and pr ...
The Tony Project’s main objective is the development of a pioneering music teaching tool for piano beginners and its implementation in the music app market. This gamified environment, the Tony Game (TG) for piano and tablet, will allow young music ...
More than ever, ensuring continuity of quality education is essential to strengthening the resilience of societies in the face of adversity. Yet, quality education is hard to achieve: it should promote active and effective learning which involves soc ...
Digitizing archival films is a huge emerging market with millions of films waiting to be digitized and massive funding schemes by governments and private institutions available.To this day, however, film digitization workflows have remained arbitrary ...
Brain tumors, whether they originate directly from the brain or spread to the brain when a cancer somewhere else in the body becomes metastatic, are a costly problem to healthcare systems, especially in industrialized nations.The task of detecting an ...
Prostate cancer (PCa) is the fourth most common cancer in the world, accounting for 15% of cancer diagnosed and PCa patients are expected to increase globally to 1.7 million, with 499,000 new deaths by 2030. The diagnosis of PCa generates annual cost ...
Throughout their lifetime, 1 in 3 people will be diagnosed with cancer, making it the most impactful disease of our age with a yearly death toll of over 10 million lives. Improved diagnosis and accurate, personalized treatment play a major role in su ...
This project aims at converting a technique of Artificial Intelligence (AI) developed at the Institute of Diagnostic and Interventional Radiology (DIR) of the University Hospital Zurich (USZ) into a marketable certified medical device. The product de ...
Nous développons un dispositif médical connecté afin de détecter des marqueurs biologiques reconnus pour leur capacité à détecter les risques d’accouchements prématurés. Cette technologie aidera les médecins à identifier efficacement un ...
Colorectal cancer (CRC) is the third most commonly diagnosed cancer and the fourth leading cause of cancer death in the world. 1.2 million new cases per year are reported worldwide with an increasing incidence in young adults. Around 50% of patients ...
Nowadays therapeutic decision making by the physician is based to a major extent (~70%) on biomarker testing in body fluids such as blood. Detection and quantification of chemical and biological parameters occurs mainly in central laboratories on com ...
THE PROBLEM - Sepsis and septic shocks affect annually over 18 million people worldwide and are associated with high morbidity and mortality rates, and significant costs to health-care systems. Current diagnostic methods, although highly accurate, la ...
The goal of the startup is to provide software solutions for analyzing electro-encephalographic recordings (EEG) incl. sleep EEG. EEG has shown great promise in trial stratification, patient monitoring, diagnosis and prognosis of neurodegenerative di ...
Nanoparticles (NPs) play an important role in many areas such as health, climate, and industrial processing. Nanoparticles show significantly different properties than the bulk material. This is mainly due to the increased surface to volume ratio and ...
Wind energy is a key technology for reaching the UN's sustainable development goals and the EU Energy Strategy 2030. As the wind energy industry is maturing and wind turbines are growing, there is an increasing need for cost-effective monitoring and ...
We propose to develop and demonstrate novel ultrafast dual-frequency-comb laser sources, optimized for high-performance, fast, and sensitive dual-comb molecular spectroscopy, for key relevant applications in health, safety, energy, chemical, and envi ...
Wearable devices permit the minimally invasive or non-invasive measurement of analytes in biofluids such as interstitial fluid, saliva, tears and sweat. Optimally, these measurements will serve as surrogates for analyte concentrations in blood. Over ...
Fungal infections are estimated to kill more than 1.5 million people worldwide per year. However, the issue of fungal pathogenicity is largely neglected not only by the general public, but also by policy makers and the pharmaceutical industry, despit ...
The current outbreak of a previously unknown betacoronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, started in 2019 in the city of Wuhan, China. Within a few weeks it reached pandemic proportions. As of today, virtually every country was involved and the virus caused over 160 ...
Micro-organisms present in our digestive system contribute significantly our health and well-being. Thousands of species, from Bacteria, Archaea and other eukaryotes, interact and live together to form the human gut ecology. In the developed countrie ...
Despite decades of intensive effort, traditional vaccine development strategies have proven insufficient to yield an effective vaccine against the respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), a pathogen of utmost clinical importance throughout the world, inclu ...
Utilities in Europe currently manage CHF 2.85 trillion in urban drainage assets, which provide critical infrastructure services for over 460 million people. Old infrastructure and increasing climate volatility challenge today's urban drainage systems ...
We are witnessing alarmingly high levels of micro-pollutants (MPs) such as antibiotics, pesticides, herbicides, estrogen, pharmaceuticals and diagnostic agents that enter our surface and groundwater ecosystems. According to Swiss government regulatio ...
Shallow geothermal systems and ground source heat pumps (GSHP) represent one of the most dynamic growth on the renewable market and have been identified as key area to address in order to meet EU’s 2030 targets in term of renewable energy supply an ...
“MeduSoil:Ground Bio-stabilization” has its background in the five-year long research work of the applicant. Dr Dimitrios Terzis developed during his doctoral thesis at EPFL a new smart material which is used in building applications to enable co ...
Aquaculture is a globally growing industry in which innovations are being made at many levels. In addition, an increasing number of fish is being used for scientific experiments. While technical progress has been made in fish husbandry, our understan ...
Allergies are not only common for humans, they are also very common for animals, in particular our companion animals. The most common allergic disease in horses is the insect bite hypersensitivity, a seasonal recurrent allergic dermatitis accompanied ...
With over 65 million patients suffering from glaucoma, the efficient management of clinical care pathways in almost all healthcare delivery systems needs fundamental redesign to manage costs and improve treatment outcomes. The time needed for routine ...
UrbanDataLab is a spatial knowledge platform that helps to evaluate international real estate investments based on generic location descriptives. The conceptual basis of UrbanDataLab has been worked out, and a complete scientific model has been built ...
There is increasing opportunity for pervasive sensing in internet of things (IoT) applications. Nearly all modern developments of advanced visual perception are based on deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs), reaching close to human accuracy or e ...
Our vision is a future regulatory financial reporting infrastructure that is versatile, lean, and pull-oriented working in a decentralized, diverse and fast-moving ecosystem. The solution that we intend to develop: We will create an infrastructure th ...
This project aims to revolutionize the market of ultrafast-pulsed laser sources with semiconductor technology. The goal is to validate the development of affordable laser sources in order to provide a suitable solution that enables research and indus ...
The shipping industry is vital for the world economy, providing the most economical transportation system. Unfortunately, this industry is also one of the largest air polluters in the world. Sulphur and nitrogen oxides (SOx and NOx) emitted in the ex ...
surfaces and interfaces
Our fast moving world places high demands on a business to process its’ documents almost in real time in order to respond to customer demands. As a consequence, businesses worldwide have to invest vast parts of resources in the processing of such d ...
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is considered the great disrupter of our time. Since 2012, when the current wave of AI started, the industry has seen the start of a technological revolution that is changing the way we approach a range of problems, inclu ...
Despite the arrival of digital music, producing songs remains a difficult and tedious process. It takes many hours of listening to the same thing over and over to tweak the countless parameters that are necessary for good music. Unless you have years ...
Legal teams are more overloaded than ever: suffering from slow processes and inefficiencies, they spend a vast amount of time working on tedious low-level tasks that can be automated with AI. We have conducted dozens of interviews with legal experts ...
As stated by Stephen Hawking “... the human race has no future if it doesn’t go to space”. Unfortunately, while human space exploration remains in its infancy, mankind has already contaminated Earth’s orbits with vast quantities of satellites ...
PDF is the most popular document format to provide and distribute information on the internet. It was developed by Adobe 1996 but has been an open format since 2008. It was estimated in 2015 that more than 2.5 trillion PDF documents exist on the inte ...
25,000 deaths in the European Union alone are estimated to be caused by drug-resistant bacteria every year. In addition to the increased suffering it causes, antimicrobial resistance has huge economic implications. Multidrug-resistant bacteria have b ...
Advances in modern medicine over the last decade have led to a tremendous demand for biomolecular analyses. Although powerful tools such as mass spectrometry (MS) and liquid chromatography (LC) are currently used for such analyses, certain classes of ...
Despite the current need of sustainable solutions such as bio-plastics and light-weight materials, there are very few bio-based foam alternatives to petrochemical foams on the market. Existing alternatives often do not sustain mechanical properties o ...
Today's greatest challenge in realizing energy-efficient structures from fibre-reinforced plastics lies in the capacity to manufacture high quality parts quickly and cost-effectively. This limits their availability for high volume production and thus ...
The rapid detection and identification of infectious pathogens are a critical need for healthcare in both developed and developing countries. Remarkable progress has been made in using genomic information to prevent and manage viral outbreaks. Howeve ...
Neurosurgical procedures, in particular for degenerative spine diseases have undergone steady innovation, driven by increased understanding of spinal biomechanics and bone fusion techniques. As a result, the development of sophisticated spinal instru ...
Harnessing apomixis in crop plants bears tremendous potential for plant breeding and seed production and has been viewed as the holy grail of agriculture. Apomixis, the asexual reproduction through seeds, occurs naturally in ~400 species but is not f ...
On the Swiss Central Plateau, agricultural soils that regularly saturate with water, if there are no technical measures, are widespread. These include former peat soils, soils with frequent high groundwater levels or soils that have natural compacted ...
Common inner ear disorders like hearing loss, tinnitus or vertigo, affects a significant portion of the world population. Worldwide, 466 million people have disabling hearing loss, of those, 34 million are children. The prevalent trend in the treatme ...
The growing need to analyze topographic images correlated with electrical, magnetic, and mechanical properties at a nanometer scale has made atomic force microscopy (AFM) an indispensable tool in a wide range of surface investigation applications. Gr ...
The aim of this project is to develop and test acid resistant layer-by-layer nanofiltration membranes for the recovery of phosphorus from sewage sludge and sewage sludge ash. Phosphorus recovery from sewage sludge or sewage sludge ash is going to be ...
Converting sewage sludge into biogas and mineral salts could have significant economic and environmental benefits. Sewage sludge is a major waste product in most advanced societies and its disposal is often costly. Using supercritical water technolog ...
“By Maria! Building a Sustainable Designer-Shoemaker-Customer Network”By Maria is revolutionizing the design, production, and sale of footwear on three levels. Firstly, by using a new 3D online tool, footwear designers can have their designs prod ...
I will investigate cello multiphonics, developing the innovative methodology devised in my previous research to expand current knowledge. To present these research results to musicians, I will create a smartphone application that will bridge the gap ...
Increasing the security of modern cryptography infrastructures is pivotal to guarantee the continuity of all the aspects of contemporary society. The increasing number of alarming cyber attacks on digital networks represent one of the most dangerous ...
Red blood cells are packed with hemoglobin molecules and circulate throughout the body to supply all tissues with oxygen. B-hemoglobinopathies, such as Sickle Cell Disease and Thalassemia are a family of blood diseases that affect production of adult ...
According to the Shell Sky Scenario, photovoltaics (PV) will need to reach a production capacity of 1000 GW per year from the year 2035 onwards to follow the Paris agreement and stay below 2 degrees of increase in global temperatures. This represents ...
Cancer metastasis remains the leading cause of cancer-associated deaths. Standard postoperative therapy for metastatic tumours consists of aggressive, imprecise treatment regimens and no targeted anti-metastatic therapy is available so far. Unfortuna ...
Solid tumor diagnosis and personalized cancer medicine are both multi-billion markets and predicted to grow at 14.3% and 10.7 % CAGR, respectively in the coming years. Such growth is fueled by substantial financial investments in novel biomedical tec ...
Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is one of the most widely used imaging modalities in medical diagnostics and research. Versatile soft-tissue contrast and high spatial resolution make it a key modality particularly for imaging the human brain. Freque ...
Remote magnetic navigation allows for contactless steering of catheters and microrobots. The principle has been proven in operation with more than 100’000 cardiac arrhythmia ablations executed worldwide with the Niobe magnetic manipulation system. ...
Pressure ulcers (PU) continue to be disturbingly prevalent. PU mostly affects persons who cannot reposition themselves. Consequently the highest prevalence of 85% is found in paraplegics. But also in long-term and acute care the incidence is quite hi ...
In recent years, a new area of scientific and clinical research has emerged to improve our knowledge and treatment of vestibular disorders. Pioneering work by our group established a world first with the development and implantation of a novel neurop ...
In this BRIDGE project, we aim to develop and evaluate the feasibility of a new closed-loop Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) control system that uses electrophysiological recordings in the brain, together with behavioral and physiological signal recordin ...
Poorly healing wounds are a massive burden for patients and the economy. An aging society and the rise of diabetes aggravate the issue of sometimes lethal wounds. There are a variety of wound care scenarios where a lack of effective products causes p ...
Wearable neuroimaging can sustainably improve quality of life for thousands of persons worldwide. By means of optoHIVE we develop a novel neuroimaging tool to measure brain activity in the everyday environment, which will be applied to promote novel ...
Cartilage lesions are one of the most common knee injuries. They can result in inflammation, lack of mobility, and chronic pain. The current repair strategies are unsatisfactory (25% failure rate), mainly due to the tissue’s inherently poor regener ...
Non-healing chronic wounds are a major health issue costing about 31.7 Billion USD in the US alone. Wounds or defects of the skin can have severe physical and psychological impact on patients. In hard-to-heal wounds an autologous skin transplant is ...
Sleep disturbances affect one in three people in the world, resulting in neurological and psychiatric problems, impacting hundreds of millions globally. The aim of this project is to address the bottleneck in sleep research by expanding diagnostic ca ...
Over 50% of people suffer from diseases related to chronic inflammation. Countless studies have demonstrated that lifestyle adjustments such as improved diets or increased physical activity can be highly effective at reducing chronic inflammation and ...
Project Circleg is a research project of the Institute for Design Research at Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK) in the field of industrial design. It originated from the bachelor thesis of Simon Oschwald and Fabian Engel (2018), which dealt with t ...
Recent development in pre-natal diagnosis enables the detection of life-threatening congenital diseases on fetuses during the pregnancy. Those minimally invasive interventions in the womb, called fetoscopies, consist in treating the embryo inside the ...
G Protein Coupled Receptors (GPCRs) represent 35% of all approved modern drug targets and are a major part of the 200 US most profitable drugs. These proteins are the most successful drug targets to treat diseases like cancer, Parkinson’s or Alzhei ...
Low- and Middle-Income Countries (LMICs) lack a sufficient supply of ventilators leading to sub-standard medical care and poor patient outcomes. To bridge this gap, low-cost devices that are easy to use and maintain are needed. However, the technical ...
Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) is the leading cause of death and disability in young adults, representing 1M yearly hospitalizations in the EU. After the initial trauma, 50% of patients suffer from Secondary Brain Injuries characterized by spreading de ...
We developed a new class of microfluidic-based assays for fully automated testing of drug/chemical toxicity and efficacy using the model organism Caenorhabditis elegans. We expect these novel assays to represent a new valid alternative to vertebrate ...
To overcome the limitations of state-of-the-art pacemaker lead localization methodologies, we propose an innovative system for 3-dimensional, non-invasive, real-time pacemaker lead localization using esophageal ECG. The esophageal ECG system (esoECG) ...
PROBLEMBone fractures involving a joint are complex in nature, resulting in difficult and time-consuming procedures for the treating orthopaedic surgeon. These surgeries generate inefficient and costly operating room usage of several hours. Joint fra ...
Hydrogels are known by their excellent biocompatibility, causing minimal inflammatory response and tissue damage. Their high water content gives them mechanical properties similar to those of natural tissues. The crosslinking of water-soluble polymer ...
Leg amputees wear commercial prosthetic devices that do not give any sensory information about the interaction of the device with the ground or its movement. Amputees, relying on a very limited and uncomfortable haptic information from the stump-sock ...
Nowadays, research groups at universities and in the industry are intensively using miniature biological organisms, such as the eggs of zebrafish Danio rerio, for studies in genetics, development and behavioral biology, toxicology, etc. Using the exa ...
Ground Source Heat Pump (GSHP) systems represent one of the most dynamic growth on therenewable energy market. As preserving this dynamic is essential to reach the goals of the 2050 SwissEnergy Strategy, ensuring the reliable design, affordable imple ...
Intro: Access to drinkable water represents one of the most important issues that our society meets today. Efficient water treatment requires extensive water recycling and purification which brings water-energy nexus to the first sight. Furthermore, ...
Despite corneal transplants being the most common transplant procedure, donor corneas are frequently rejected by the recipients immune system. Up to 25% of patients experience a rejection episode, and approximately half of these episodes lead to tran ...
Efficient and reliable delivery of drugs to the colon has not been achieved yet. Nevertheless, colonic delivery is needed for the treatment of inflammatory bowel disease, a malady with increasing incidence. Moreover, specific targeting to the colon c ...
Thrombosis is one of the leading causes of morbidity and mortality worldwide. It is caused by the abnormal formation of a clot within a blood vessel, which obstructs the blood flow. Treatment and prevention of thrombotic diseases are based on anticoa ...
Affective disorders are widespread in society (~20% of the CH population) with an estimated economic burden of 8 Bn CHF per year. Despite high prevalence, most of the available antidepressants show suboptimal efficacy and are currently prescribed in ...
Type 2 diabetes prevalence rates are rising world-wide as consequence of the current obesity epidemic. This trend is also observable in Switzerland. Diabetes is a serious condition and likely causes harmful, irreversible secondary disorders, which ma ...
Antibiotics, the foundation drugs on which modern medicine relies, are becoming increasingly ineffective as pathogens acquire resistance mechanisms. There is a severe shortage of novel drugs in the discovery and development pipeline, especially again ...
Antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs) are an important class of targeted delivery therapeutics. Historically, small cytotoxic drugs have been the most commonly utilised agents for the treatment of cancer, thanks to their high cytotoxicity and relatively lo ...
To develop better drugs and to cure diseases, it is important to understand protein structure not only because they serve as biological targets, but also because protein function depends on structure. Protein structures are obtained using high-resolu ...
Despite the recent advances in cancer research and therapy, including checkpoint blockade immunotherapy, the percentage of patients responding successfully to these treatments is still poor. Cancer is still the second leading cause of death globally, ...
Autoimmunity describes a condition where immune cells attack normal cells of different tissues thereby inflicting serious damage to vital organs. Well-known autoimmune diseases include type-1 diabetes mellitus, multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthriti ...
The best conditions to grow mushrooms -- 15 degrees Celsius, 85 percent humidity and darkness -- aren't attractive working conditions for humans. Western European mushroom farmers and especially Swiss farmers have difficulty finding staff and staying ...
Heavy physical labour is daily business for millions of workers worldwide across a variety of industries. From moving companies to factories, logistics, and construction companies, workers execute physically demanding tasks such as frequent lifting a ...
Tracking personalized nutritional rhythms is essential for efficient obesity treatment, a global epidemic affecting 13% of the world’s population. Thereby, nutrition, exercise as well as fasting periods should be personalized to the individual reac ...
The design and manufacturing process of many consumer goods and other products requires the use of computer-aided design (CAD) tools for its geometrical conception and of computer-aided engineering (CAE) software for simulating its performance, usual ...
With the closing of its nuclear power plants, the limited additional potential of hydropower, and the intermittency of future PV power, Switzerland will become strongly dependent on electricity import, particularly in winter. On the other hand, it po ...
Drones will soon fill our aerial ecosystem in the field imaging/cartography, parcel delivery (La Poste, Amazon), and passenger transport (Uber Elevate). Drones will need to operate around the clock in arbitrary atmospheric conditions, especially in a ...
Energy storage on the grid-scale is gaining importance in the context of the use of an increasing share of “new” renewables, such as solar and wind power, for electricity generation. The energy storage market is expected to grow significantly ove ...
In LINIOS we will develop and mature an optical spectroscopic gas sensor using lithium niobate integrated photonics technology. The core optical system will consist of an optical frequency comb source, a sensing area and an accurate, broadband and hi ...
At ETH Zurich we have pioneered a new plasmonic modulator technology which overcomes limitations of the state-of-the-art technology. In particular the technology exceeds today’s speed limitations while offering still the most compact footprint, CMO ...
In contrast to Switzerland's international image as a quiet country of mountains and lakes, the situation is different in some cities and agglomerations, in which many people are being affected by excessive road traffic, train and plane noises. The g ...
During my PhD, I worked on the development of brain-inspired or neuromorphic architectures that performs more than 10x better than existing neuromorphic systems, especially when operating on sensor data streams such as audio data. I implemented these ...
CMOS systems-on-chips (SoCs) are the basic building blocks of modern technologies ranging from every-day products such as cell-phones, laptops, cars, or remote controls to ICT infrastructure including data centers, communication networks, or smart gr ...
Preserving the quality of food products during processing and storage remains a major challenge for food industry. Especially introducing and preserving the aroma and the micro-structure of additive-free, natural food products remains demanding. Exte ...
Today milk and dairy product consumption are responsible for 3-4% of global Greenhouse Gas emissions, and consumption is rising. The market for dairy alternatives, which have a significantly lower carbon footprint, is growing but is not convincing a ...
Concerning the use of 3D printing processes for product developments in the food domain, there is overwhelming interest. This relates mainly to possibilities for the production of newly shaped, individualized products with specific texture and locall ...
Annually, 74% of the final energy consumption in industry is used for heat generation. More than 90% of this is coming from coal, natural gas and oil, generating around 6.6 Gt CO2/year or 20% of the global CO2 emissions. However, more than half of th ...
From portable electronics to electric mobility, rechargeable batteries are becoming an essential part of our daily lives. It is expected that by 2030, the annual battery production will explode, reaching a market of €250 billion. Batteries can stor ...
Manufacturing Lithium-ion batteries involves a number of chemical intensive processing steps starting from materials mining to electrode processing. Reducing the chemical load in the processing steps is considered quite important as we move towards a ...
Buildings are responsible for roughly one third of the global energy consumption. With predictive control, the operation of buildings can be improved significantly at low costs. Our technology, which implements predictive control on the basis of phys ...
Despite significant advances in machine learning and industrial automation, robots are still primarily used in controlled environments such as factory floors and research labs. Tasks that are seemingly simple for us humans turn out to be surprisingl ...
In order to monitor safe boarding and exiting of ropeway systems multiple depth sensors observe the critical areas from a number of camera angles. Detection networks identify passengers as well as their poses as a starting point for classification of ...
Drones are becoming ubiquitous in our daily lives with applications ranging from aerial imaging for entertainment to industrial inspection and agriculture. However, drones’ teleoperation still heavily relies on visual feedback through screens or go ...
Switzerland is land of Alps, with mild weather and considerable precipitation. There is a great potential for food production, but sustainable farming seems hard to achieve. Many farms are too small to be economically viable. An average Swiss farm wa ...
In order to realize the full economic potential of drones, it is critical to allow them to operate in our cities autonomously & beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS). However, currently most commercial drones are technologically inadequate to operate s ...
The goal of project Ascento is to advance the development of wheeled bipedal robotic systems, bringing them out of the lab to the real world. Our solution combines the best of two worlds: It uses the versatility of legs to overcome stairs and obstacl ...
Impairments to hands and upper-limbs functions are among the most common consequences of injuries that affect the central- and peripheral- nervous systems, such as cerebrovascular accidents, spinal cord injuries, and cerebral palsies.Due to the funda ...
This project aims to develop a superior battery replacement, based on supercapacitor technology, that exhibits ultra-fast charging, improved lifetime, ecological friendliness, and a wide range of operating temperatures while having the same energy st ...
embedded syst.
Biodegradable materials are gaining attention, within the scientific community and the society, for problems related to food quality, climate change and the generation of electronic waste. Meanwhile, sensors are playing an increasing role in our live ...
Despite the several sophisticated techniques developed in the last twenty years, diabetes remains one of the first causes of non-traumatic lower limb amputation worldwide. This is mainly due to the combination of peripheral neuropathy, which determin ...
The project aims to commercialize a gas sensor chip for vacuum instrumentation. Vacuum manufacturing processes a number of products we use in daily life, like electronic chips, window coatings, pharmaceuticals, and battery cells. No vacuum is perfe ...
Rise Up! is a medical tool specially designed to help disabled people and elderly get up autonomously after a fall.In Switzerland alone, 400'000 people are the victims of a fall at home every year. They are either suffering from diseases or of the co ...
BEAWEAR is a pioneering B2B SAAS fashion-tech solution to help apparel brands eliminate the problem of incorrect fit and to drastically reduce online returns, costs, and waste. We do this by providing retailers with an easy API plug-and-play solution ...
Today, less people have access to a toilet than to a mobile phone. Through this project, I want to establish a social business that allows me contributing to achieve sustainable sanitation globally, while sustaining my team and my family. Access to s ...
Unprecedented challenges linked to climate change are pressuring cities to decarbonize their built environment. While clean technologies exist, their implementation is too slow to reach climate targets, mainly due to undigitized toolsets, which lead ...
Soil health is a pressing global issue that needs urgent attention and action. This project aims to redefine the assessment of soil health and soil pollution. We propose the use of high-throughput technologies to evaluate soil health. To validate the ...
The reduction of pesticide use in agriculture has become a major socio economic and environmental concern. The project that we propose is dedicated to the development of novel approaches and technologies, involving photonics (lensless microscopy, pty ...
While 50% of the total agricultural lands are moderate to severely degraded, primarily due to intensive farming practices, there is currently no scalable and reliable method to monitor soil health. Therefore, my co-founder Dr Sonia Meller and I creat ...
Coconut husks have the potential for an international and sustainable innovation in the fiberboard industry. With numerous logging bans in the Philippines and other tropical countries on the one hand and the growing general awareness of Bio Based Bui ...
Thermal insulation is the key to save energy in buildings, a major challenge in Europe and worldwide. The solution to this problem is to promote higher energy efficiency in buildings by increasing the thermal insulation layer (through several program ...
The chemistry Nobel prize 2017 has been awarded for the development of cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM). This experimental technique proved to be one of the most successful methods to probe the structure of proteins with atomic resolution. To provi ...
Microencapsulation is widely used to carry and deliver active material to its target in various fields, such as pharmaceutics, cosmetics, or nutraceutics. The combined microencapsulation and microparticle market revenue in 2020 is estimated to US$13. ...
Thanks to the BRIDGE Proof-of-Concept grant, we developed highly-porous materials made from waste / natural materials used for thermal building insulation. Because current building thermal insulation materials are energy consuming, flammable, polluta ...
We have developed a process for highly breathable, yet waterproof membranes for applications in functional outdoor equipment. The pores are introduced via a template removal method and are at the same time functionalized to ensure sweat to leave from ...
The industry has long relied on the use of high refractive index media, such as titanium dioxide (TiO2) nanoparticles and other inorganic materials to produce so-called light scattering enhancers. Such materials are processed in the production of whi ...
Fibers
Leather)
Coffee is the most traded beverage commodity in the world with an estimated trade value over $15bn per annum. Its market volume - 10 million tons of beans farmed and sold in 2018 alone - is predicted to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 7.2 % ...
Fibers
Leather)
Robotic automation excels in the repetitive handling of rigid objects. These tasks employ grippers that are relatively simple (1 or 2 degrees of freedom) and object specific (i.e., not versatile, unlike a human hand).Soft grippers are robotic end-eff ...
Additive Manufacturing (AM, better known as 3D printing), and Selective Laser Melting (SLM) in particular, currently represent a very hot topic with a lot of media hype surrounding it. With many of the patents in the field expiring, we are observing ...
Additive Manufacturing (AM) or 3D printing is expected to become an essential manufacturing technology of Industry 4.0. While 3D printed polymer objects are typically much weaker than their injection-molded counterparts, increasing the number of avai ...
Patient-tailored devices made of soft materials are increasingly demanded for medical applications, for instance for preoperative training of surgeons or to make compliant wearable devices such as hearing aids. Such customized devices are currently p ...
The increasing prevalence of patients with cardiovascular diseases has enforced the number and complexity of minimally invasive medical procedures recently. Advanced diagnostic catheters play an important role for such interventions. The trend goes t ...
Lasers find their ways in an ever-increasing number of applications, directly or indirectly influencing our daily-life. Telecommunications, manufacturing, construction, spectroscopy and microscopy are just, but a handful of examples of technological ...
Electronic waste, or E-waste, is one of the fastest growing waste streams in the world. A large majority of e-waste, particularly in developing economies, is processed by the informal recycling sector often in residential areas without tools or prote ...
Right now, the world faces a plastic crisis. Poly(ethylene terephthalate) (PET) is found in our oceans, landfills, and even in marine invertebrates. Of the 20 million tonnes of PET plastic produced annually only 9% is recycled while the vast majorit ...
Les membranes sont un élément important de l'industrie de la séparation des gaz , cependant, l'état actuel de la technique des membranes de séparation des gaz est soumis à un compromis perméabilité-sélectivité. Les membranes à grands pores ...
Logic-Based Risk and Regulatory Management (Syntherion) uses compositional modeling and sets a flexible Machine Learning framework to provide more accurate representations and reliable evaluations of banks' risk factors such as probabilities of defau ...
Anthropogenic activities cause disruption to natural ecosystems, which can in turn impact the functioning of human societies. To ensure long-term societal well being, the monitoring of living organisms is becoming increasingly critical in a variety o ...
Bacterial pathogens are a major cause of illness and death, and an economic barrier to development in poor countries. The overuse of antibiotics - especially in food production animals - has led to a dramatic global rise in antimicrobial resistance ( ...
The rise of multidrug-resistant bacteria threatens the achievements of modern medicine. Particularly problematic in this context is the increasing resistance of the pathogens Escherichia coli, Klebsiella pneumoniae, Acinetobacter baumannii and Pseudo ...
Adverse outcome pathways (AOPs) are novel tools for human risk assessment, designed to represent critical toxicological effects. The main purpose of AOPs is to help establish (quantitative) structure-activity relationships and develop novel in vitro ...
Epigenetic mechanisms induce changes in the phenotype of an organism without affecting its genetic code and they have been associated to development, cancer and neurodegeneration, among others. In the context of epigenetics, protein-DNA interactions ...
Background and Working HypothesisThe overarching goal of the ABCD project is to provide full access to recombinant antibodies for the academic community. This project is currently developed by the Geneva Antibody Facility. It is anticipated that the ...
The hereinafter outlined project is aimed at the establishment of a sustainable cocoa butter resource for food applications, such as in chocolate production, based on a plant cell culture from the cocoa plant Theobroma cacao. Prior studies at the Zur ...
The analysis of extremely small samples is boosting the field of life and medical science, from basic research on single-cell systems, through point-of-care diagnostics, to forensic analysis. Despite great advances made on analytical techniques such ...
Numerous processes in the life sciences exhibit a trend towards reduced sample volumes. Several process steps require the reliable, reproducible, and contamination-free manipulation of samples with a single-cell selectivity, i.e. in the range of 10-1 ...
Obesity and its severe comorbidities remain a major burden for our societies, economy, and the billions of affected individuals. The associated yearly economic cost is about two trillion US-dollar, roughly equivalent to the economic damage caused by ...
Gene therapy holds the possibility to revolutionize the way otherwise incurable genetic diseases are treated. In principle, it allows for the DNA within a cell to be changed. With the dawn of new gene editing technologies such as CRISPR-Cas9 (cluster ...
Malignant brain tumours are of the most aggressive cancer types and still virtually incurable. Despite aggressive treatment methods such as radiation, surgery and chemotherapy, patients’ survival remains very poor. In the past years, a lot of effor ...
3D cell technologies are revolutionizing drug discovery and personalized medicine. They can better recapitulate native physiological milieu in comparison to standard cell cultures and animal models. Also, animal testing shows lack of reproducibility, ...
The generation of antibodies and their development into approved drugs for the treatment of diseases is a main focus of today’s pharmaceutical industry worldwide and a multi-billion market. Biomolecular drug development is typically a funnel-like p ...
Are neurons miswired in autistic brains? How are the pathogenic agents of a developing tumor spatially arranged? To answer such questions hundreds of academic and industrial laboratories scrutinize ultrathin (a few dozens of nanometers thick) tissue ...
The invention at the heart of this project constitutes a major advance by using a novel method to visualize retinal cells with high contrast and resolution. The method uses oblique illumination, which provides a dark field configuration. The light ba ...
Osteoarthritis (OA) is the most common human musculoskeletal disease, affecting 75% of people older than 55. Due to population aging, OA is expected to be a heavy economic burden on world-wide healthcare systems. No definitive pharmacological treatme ...
We will develop a disruptive new technology platform, the Modular Designer Detectome, with the ambition to complement and replace conventional monoclonal antibody technology in the non-therapeutic field, as it has become apparent that many reagent mA ...
In our project we propose to develop and apply, in the Swiss context, a democratic innovation - the so-called “deliberative mini-public”, whose participants are ordinary citizens selected by sortition (random selection) based on the official regi ...
Providing electrical power in a reliable, clean and cost-effective manner is yet a tough technical and logistical challenge for many industries. Many applications starting from IoT devices in remote locations (e.g. mountain, arctic area) mobile surve ...
Decarbonization is one of the major challenges for our society. The industrial sector is particularly important to decarbonize as it is pivotal for economic prosperity but emits more than 20% of global greenhouse gases. At the same time, industrial e ...
Many key strategic applications and expected high-growth markets including LIDAR, quantum computing and sensing, GPS and clocking, require ultra-stable lasers. These have to operate at narrow optical linewidth, extremely low noise, and a very low dri ...
An optical frequency comb is an optical spectrum consisting of a series of equally spaced narrow-band frequencies. Such optical sources have made an outstanding leap forward in the accuracy and simplification of frequency metrology and provided an at ...
This project aims to enable cost-effective label-free imaging of biological samples and non-destructive testing of semiconductor structures with significant performance improvements to standard methods. This will be achieved by utilizing a recently d ...
We propose to develop and test in realistic field tests a new generation of seismic sensor networks with performances substantially exceeding current capabilities. Seismic sensors are powerful, highly versatile and cost-efficient tools for a wide ran ...
The main objective of this project is to provide the scientific and technical basis for next generation pulsed electron sources that outperform current technology by several orders of magnitude. Success in this technology will enable the improvement ...
Micro and nano systems
The mid-infrared (MIR) part of the electromagnetic spectrum contains the fundamental ro-vibrational transitions of a wide range of molecules that are relevant in environmental, medical, industrial and security applications. Quantum Cascade Lasers (QC ...
Micro and nano systems
Nanoparticles (NPs) are increasingly used in a wide variety of applications. The characterization of NPs before application and their detection in the final product is of great importance for producers of NP containing products. Only a well-implement ...
Micro and nano systems
Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) methods enable non-invasive studies of intact living matter. As a well-known example, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanners are today an extremely powerful clinical diagnostic tool used in hospitals worldwide. Tha ...
Micro and nano systems
AimsThe project aims to create a start-up company (NexMR), offering solutions for drug design through disruptive technology identifying molecular starting points, or fragments. Our proprietary technology will be developed to perform high throughput f ...
The construction industry has to address climate issues such as CO2 emissions due to cement production and resources depletion as billions of sand is used each year to produce concrete. In the meantime, construction activities generate billions of to ...
The key idea is to deliver an innovative corrosion inspection technique, as the first solution to tackle the important problem of guaranteeing the safety of traffic infrastructures lines near cantilever retaining walls. It is well documented that the ...
Imaging methods based on waveform analysis are used to investigate the interior of a wide variety of objects, from aerospace components, to transportation infrastructure, to the Earth’s subsurface, and to human tissue. While leading a diverse set o ...
Every year more than 100 million endodontic root canal treatments are performed worldwide. In the United States alone 25 million surgeries are done every year. In developed countries on average 9% of the population has one endodontic treatment per ye ...
Today, 10-15 % of the world’s total energy consumption is caused by separation processes. One of the most energy-intense process is the separation of olefins from paraffins, such as propylene from propane. Cryogenic distillation, currently employed ...
Neurological and psychiatric disorders are among the most common and debilitating illnesses across the lifespan. Currently, neuropsychologists typically use paper-pencil tests to assess individual neuropsychological functions and brain dysfunctions, ...
The popularity of Bitcoin has led to the creation of many hundreds of other cryptocurrencies as well as application-specific units known as crypto “tokens”. The demand for markets to trade these assets on has in turn spawned a large and dynamic a ...
Goal of this Proof of Concept project is to transfer the knowledge of the new and extended requirements of the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) from previous legal research into an automated Data-Protection-as-a-Service solution. This DPa ...
More and more user data is digitalized, processed and stored on the cloud in areas like health, financial services, energy, e-governance, food or education. Yet, as the amount of sensitive data exponentially increases, the awareness for security risk ...
The key idea behind A-METAL is to build an affordable, compact, and user-friendly laser powder bed fusion (LPBF) system. The LPBF process - a layer-by-layer metal powder bed-based laser welding manufacturing process - is already known in industry and ...
Due to their advantageous handling and stability, their safety, bioactivity and low immunogenicity, exosomes have emerged as versatile therapeutic agents and as possible substitutes for cell therapy. They are found in various biological fluids, inclu ...