Two Open Mind awards for 3mE-researchers

Jens Kober of the 3mE-department
CoR and Tope Agbana and Gleb Vdovin of the 3mE-department DCSC received an Open Mind funding for daring research proposals. NWO awarded five Open Mind grants of 50,000 euros for socially relevant and out-of-the-box research. Together with the AMC, Jens Kober is working on robot-assistance for dentist students. Tope Agbana and Gleb Vdovin develop a portable measuring device that can quickly detect the animal variant of sleeping sickness.

Robot-assistance for dental student
Pulling teeth and molars is a standard treatment by dentists, but strangely enough there is no method by which students can learn how to do it. They have to learn it in practice. This causes stress for both the student and the person in the dentist's chair, who as a 'guinea pig' undergoes a more painful treatment. It would be nice if dentists learned the best way to remove teeth during their training. To determine the best way, robots can offer help, according to Dr Jens Kober (Delft University of Technology) and Tom van Riet (Amsterdam Academic Medical Centre). With a smart robot arm full of sensors, they want to practice on dentures and dentures of body donors. The data that emerges from this should show what the best drawing method is, and can then be used to make instructional animations for students. Kober and Van Riet can develop this idea with an Open Mind grant.

Smart parasite detector for animals
About 3 million animals die annually in Africa from the animal variant of sleeping sickness, also called nagana. However, diagnosing a nagana infection is very cumbersome and time consuming. That method should be improved, according to Tope Agbana and Gleb Vdovin from Delft University of Technology. They won an Open Mind grant for their proposal to develop a portable measuring device that can quickly and easily detect nagana at an early stage. This is done by optically screening blood samples from animals and releasing an algorithm on those images that recognises nagana symptoms. The device must be so simple that livestock farmers can operate it themselves.