Innovations

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Digital twins for food supply chains
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We are on a quest to identify when and where we lose the quality of fresh fruit and vegetables for every shipment in domestic and overseas supply chains. One approach is to create digital twins that live together with their real-world counterparts to bridge the virtual to the real world. With these augmented insights, we target reducing food loss, increasing plant-based foods' shelf life, and making postharvest supply chains resilient through better decision-making and logistics. You can read more in our papers (The virtual container, strawberry package twins, strawberry packaging design, pre and postharvest twins, trade-offs in citrus supply chainsDo we need digital food twins?, a mango twin) and projects (smart strawberry, flower2fork).

Digital twins of the human body
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We develop digital-twin-based therapeutics for transdermal drug delivery of fentanyl that are tailored to the patient. Transdermal drug delivery with patches is a non-invasive technology that is currently used to (self-) administer drugs in lower doses. Our twin simulates drug uptake, transport, and metabolization in the human body and the resulting pain relief. Instead of a “one-size-fits-all” approach, we can design future drug delivery therapies or devices that account for patient lifestyle and genetic disposition. You can read more in our papers (switching from oral to transdermal drugs, thermally-controlled drug delivery, 3000 twins of patients, drug uptake through the skin).

Food-as-Medicine interventions
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Food-as-Medicine is an emerging trend among medical doctors, health insurers, startups, and governmental public-health and non-governmental organizations. Food-as-Medicine implies using food as a part of an individual's health plan to prevent or help treat acute and chronic health conditions and diseases. There is a large potential for using food to achieve health impacts as they are consumed periodically on a daily basis. Using this approach, we are currently working on targeting the prevention and treatment of type-2 diabetes, which is one of the most relevant non-communicable diseases in Switzerland. Diabetes has a yearly cost to the Swiss healthcare system of 1.7 billion CHF. Next to prevention, we also target pre- and rehabilitation in the clinics. We are developing new digitally-driven, nutrition-based health interventions. We also identify hurdles in Food-as-Medicine interventions and link these interventions with a healthy food supply chain and related technologies. This work aligns with the Swiss national strategy 2025-2028 for the prevention of NCDs.

Your Virtual Cold chain assistant
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In the Your Virtual Cold Chain Assistant ecosystem, we aim to better retain product quality, reduce food loss, and increase farmer income in low- and middle-income countries. We apply a set of tools, including a mobile application (Coldtivate). You can read more in our publications (cold store operators manual, bottlenecks in Nigeria's supply chain, the virtual cold chain methodology) and look at our map of India (project, paper) and map of Nigeria (paper).

Electrohydrodynamic airflow generation
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Generating airflow without any fans, but just using high voltages. Interesting. In addition, you get a low energy use and can design these 'ionic wind fans' in all shapes and sizes. We have used them to dry foods or biomedical equipment and are currently rolling out the tech in a startup. You can read more in our papers (an energy-saving needle, our ionic wind prototype, experimental proof-of-concept, in-silico proof-of-concept, EHD vs. conventional drying, energy efficient food drying, our first insights in ionic wind drying).

Fishnet harvesting buoys
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We are developing a prototype and testing the feasibility of a fishnet harvesting buoy that finds and tags ghost nets at the ocean surface. This ghost gear, mostly fishing nets floating at the surface, composes over half of all marine plastic. The main bottleneck for removing ghost nets is that the cost of ocean cleaning or mining for plastics is too high. One reason is that finding them is a needle-in-a-haystack challenge. Our buoy could tackle this and thereby help to protect marine life by a more cost-efficient finding of ghost nets. Moreover, it enables mining for plastic as a resource that can be recycled, for example into textiles, consumer goods, or automotive parts. You can read more in our papers (The concept).

Passive evaporative cooling
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We developed and deployed an alternative passive evaporative cooler: the charcoal cooling blanket. Evaporative cooling is a high-potential technology to help preserve fresh produce after harvest. This passive cooling solution is especially interesting for marginal and smallholder farmers in remote, off-grid areas. However, we lack simple, small-scale evaporative cooling systems that are affordable for marginal and smallholder farmers. Our blanket is easily constructed in any size from locally sourced materials and is semi-self-supporting. We have been deploying this in Kenya, Uganda and Nigeria so far. You can read more in our papers (the concept, where to deploy evaporative coolers best, the simplest charcoal cooler) and project (the charcoal cooler) and our where-to-cool tool.

The Virtual Lab
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We bring our physics-based simulations out of our servers and make them available to anyone. To this end, we create stand-alone, open-access apps that you can download here. That way, anyone can experience the advantages of physics-based simulations.

Bio-physical fruit twins
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We developed and tested physical twins of fruit. These fruits look like a fruit, thermally behave like a fruit but are no fruits. We biomimetically designed them to react almost identically to real fruit (and validated this) in order to measure in a more standardized way parameters such as pulp temperature, for example. We can also easily measure from farm to retail in "hard-to-reach" locations within the cargo. We are now expanding this sensor platform to measure more parameters for more fruit types. You can read more in our papers (the artificial fruitthe artificial fruit mark 2) and a press release.

Innovations in postharvest supply chain monitoring and technologies
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We are on a quest to identify when and where we lose the quality of fresh fruit and vegetables for every shipment in domestic and overseas supply chains. One approach is to sense more parameters at more locations at the same time in new ways. You can read more in our papers (ML-based banana fruit quality check, postharvest solution roadmap, thermal mapping of refrigerated trailersmapping the ES-CH supply chain, monitoring cooling of each single fruit in a pallet, thermal mapping of citrus precooling).


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