Projects

The research cluster with over 20 institutes from material science, mechanical engineering, computer science, and social sciences addresses research challenges in the context of Industry 4.0. It has the vision to enable cross-domain collaboration by providing semantically adequate and context-aware data and decision support from production, development and usage in real-time on an appropriate level of granularity. The central scientific approach is the introduction of Digital Shadows as purpose-driven, aggregated, multi-perspective and persistent datasets.

The Cluster of Excellence "Integrative Production Technology for High-Wage Countries" is an interdisciplinary research project at RWTH Aachen University. It pursues the long-term goal to increase the competitiveness of German manufacturing technology and is part of the Excellence Initiative of the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research and the German Research Foundation.

The project engineered smart interactive textiles for end users, by interweaving conductive yarns into garments. These interactive textiles were adapted to different usage scenarios and integrated into different functional demonstrators:

For example, a smart jacket that enables people to control media and the surrounding space or a smart armchair that people can control intuitively through its textiles surface. The smart armchair won an award at the international furniture fair “Interzum”.

I was part of the interdisciplinary “eHealth” research group that envisions how ubiquitous Ambient Assisted Living Environments can be designed to meet the demographic change and how technology should support us when we grow old. The project combined multidisciplinary perspectives from computer science, psychology, sociology and medical engineering and integrate a technical, as well as a humane perspective through user-centered and participatory design processes and regular evaluations of the developed systems.

(Carbon) fiber reinforced plastics ((C)FRP) are a promising material for light-weight structures with advanced mechanical requirements, used, e.g., in aerospace and automotive applications. However, working with CFRP is hard, due to the large variances in material, process, and product.  Thus, designing and implementing worker support systems is especially challenging.

To meet the demand for qualified experts from Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) we developed a set of measures for school children (to raise their interest in STEM and their self-efficacy) and university students (to increase the retention rate).

Participatory design and validation of an intuitive gesture set for multi-touch interaction with medical image data for PACS workstations. Validation of the gesture set on three different display form factors.