ME310 Projects of the Year 2013-2014

Meetings are a fundamental part of corporate culture, and they are necessary to disseminate information, exchange ideas, formulate strategy, and make executive decisions that “steer a company’s fortune.” As a multi-national publicly-traded corporation, like Siemens are challenged to establish and maintain accurate internal data streams for analysis and act as the foundation for executive decision making. Siemens AG has prompted a student team consisting of four IT students from the HPI and three ME students from Stanford University to “redesign the experience for decision makers” and create the boardroom of the future. From Oct 2013 to Jun 2014, they have continuously worked to understand the problem domain, and the process of executive decision making. Their findings revealed that executives are frustrated with the inefficiencies in today’s meetings, like tedious technical setup and a non-collaborative environment. Furthermore, high level decision-makers seek to leverage data in order to provide quantifiable insight into past and current operations. As there is no way to access live data on-demand during meetings, these data-related questions can only be answered immediately and need to be anticipated and prepared beforehand. As a solution they propose The Q. It is a meeting experience that reinvents executive decision making to be more productive, data-centric, and enjoyable. We have created a physical environment that fosters teamwork, combined with a software system that provides instant access to live data and allows control of the meeting through a dynamic agenda. This integrated system embeds all required technology so executives have a predictable and uncomplicated user experience.

Pharma industry is facing a new era. Once a new drug is released to the market, drug manufacturers need to know how their products behave in a real life environment. After usually more than ten years of drug development and clinical tests, health insurances and others who pay for a drug demand proof of efficiacy, information on long term consequences and interferences with other medicine. Therefore, a big amount of "real life evidence data" is gathered by leading pharma companies like Bayer. In a more and more digital world, problems and opportunities for this process emerge. That is why Bayer Healthcare has challenged a team of 2 Finnish and 4 German students with the task to improve gathering, managing and merging real life evidence data. Soon after exploring the problem space, the students found that data structure and quality varies heavily among different sources, institutions and countries. Thus, instead of trying to merge existing sources, they propose to create a crowd-powered open and combined data source by leveraging the increasing potential of health awareness and self-tracking. With LINK, the team built a platform for everyone to improve healthcare research by participating in studies posed by researchers. LINK makes it easy for people to contribute data through interactive questionaires, provided blood values and integrated self-tracking devices. Using an app for mobile devices, study participants can track their medicine intake, gather data and share among healthcare research. With study incentives and a real patient story, researchers are able to reach out to the right participants for their studies.
LINK is a step towards a real life evidence process, where patients and pharma work closely together to create the medicine of the future. 

An average French person spends one hour a day in the bathroom. It is used for daily hygiene, making yourself ready to go out and since the 1970s wellness also plays a big role in its func- tion. This is also the case for the increasing number of seniors in our society. In France, there are currently 9 million people who are over 75 years old. At this age physical impairments in- crease. The muscles are weaker, the balance is less steady, the body is stiffer and the senses degenerate gradually. The devices, materials or items in the bathroom are often not adapted to deal with such impairments. Since the bathroom is the place with the highest number of accidents at home, the autonomy of the elderly is linked considerably with the adaptation of their bathroom. This need for adap- tation and the demographic changes of the future provide a significant business opportunity for Lapeyre - one of the major bathroom distributors and manufacturers in France. Lapeyre has given this challenge to a team of eight international students, currently studying at ENPC Paris and Hasso Plattner Institute Potsdam. Together we combine professional experience in Computer Science, Industrial Engineering, Civil Engineering and Wood Product.
Thanks to many interviews with medical experts and users, we understood that a bathroom for elderly needs to not only answer to functional needs but also has to be aesthetically desirable. It’s difficult to accept physical difficulties when you get older and thus products should not stigmatise one as being old, by a poor design and a purely clinical look. They should instead provide comfort without showing their user’s need for help.
During the last nine months, we developed two prototypes that answer to those needs. The first one - Intemporel – is a new bathroom furniture that provides comfort by offering a re- laxing seating position while giving easy access to all products of daily use. Unlike unhomely clinic-like "elderly furniture“, our product is for all age groups, whether they simply want to relax and sit back while they are brushing their teeth or wish to rest while standing for a long time. You can see this prototype in picture 2. Due to a certain conservatism in the bathroom market and a need for a simplistic and feasible product we settled for a clean and unobtrusive solution that incorporates a sink into a traditional dressing table, thus combining the comfort of a coiffeuse with the functional and hygienic requirements of a sink.
Since taking a shower is one of the most important activities in the bathroom and also the place where most accidents happen, we also tackled the issue of access to water and soap with a magnetic shower column. This prototype tries to address the problems of storing various items of the shower in the accessible zone between shoulder and hip.
Both prototypes are going to be produced commercially and sold within the near future. Intemporel will be available in Lapeyre stores by September 2014.