Projects and Programs
Presently, the NWA route Measuring and Detecting facilitates and coordinates of two route programs, viz. the Kleine projecten program ‘Analysis of plastics and composites for recycling and environment’ and the larger StartImpuls program ‘Measuring and detecting healthy behaviour’.
Measuring and Detecting Healthy Behaviour
This NWA StartrImpuls program sets out to identify the challenges and solutions that come up with the transfer of measurement and detection in the lab context to measurement of complex systems in their natural environment. To this end it use a concrete, important but also complex example: the health of humans in relation to their behaviour and environment. The program intends to:
- Find new parameters and/or biomarkers that relate to health and disease in blood, food products and in the air that we breathe.
- Develop methods to measure such parameters in the lab and outside the lab
- Use existing methods that already can be applied outside the lab to determine the relation between these measurement and health and disease.
- Investigate what is necessary to gather such data with a quality that is sufficient to draw conclusions about the health of an individual.
- Investigate how the interaction between measurement instrumentation and user must be organised to ensure good measurement quality, good understanding of the resulting information and sensible data management.
To this end the scientists involved work on:
- Development and validation of (bio)markers/parameters of healthy behaviour
- Determination of the exposure of individuals to air pollution
- Development of personalized sensores for the monitoring of healthy food
- Development of sensors for important health parameters
- Data Science & Chemometrics
- Explorative sensor development for mobile monitoring of personalhealth
- The user: interface and ethics
Analysis of plastics and composites for recycling and environment
The capacity to differentiate between materials for reuse and recycling is crucial to avoid the transition of man-made substances, materials and devices into waste. The subprojects of ‘Analysis of plastics and composites for recycling and environment’ focus on the in situ detection of PFAS and on smart characterisation of electronics and plastic for reuse and recycling.
The subprojects are co-ordinated b:
- Automatic sorting of waste printed circuit boards – Saxion Hogeschool
- Pre- and post-collection separation of plastic waste – Radboud University
- Development of a PFAS sensor – TNO