From 18 to 25 September 2022, a summer school of the Kenya sub-project of Inter3DNA took place at THB. Students and lecturers from THB and MMUST were working together on solutions for three use cases in the fields of agriculture, telemedicine, and energy supply. The summer school was the start of a practice-orientated students‘ cooperation between MMUST and THB. Students from different degree programmes formed interdisciplinary project groups for further virtual collaboration over the course of the 2022/23 winter semester and got to know each other personally. Agile working methods and technical content for the group projects were taught and jointly developed. To conclude the virtual collaboration, THB students will travel to Kenya at the end of February 2023 to finalise their projects with the students on site and test the solutions they have developed.
The interdisciplinary teams are working on the following topics:
In the first project, students are working on the optimisation of an experimental biogas plant in Kakamega. The aim is to equip the biogas plant with IoT (Internet of Things) sensors and an app that can be used to control and monitor the plant.
The second project focuses on medical care in rural areas of Kenya. Students are developing IoT-based solutions for telemedicine applications to record parameters such as ECG, oxygen partial pressure, body temperature or pulse so that patients can be examined from a great distance.
As the infrastructure in Western Kenya is poorly developed and the power supply is unreliable, a third team is working on the development of a solar-powered electricity generator that small farmers can use without any prior knowledge.
We are excited to see what the project teams will develop and what solutions they will propose. Finally, the results of the projects will be presented at a Winter School in Kenya in 2023.