Smartphone as a microscope : Date:
For more than two decades, the BMBF has been providing targeted support to research at universities of applied sciences (UAS). Now, one example has shown quite well what effect this funding can have: a young scientist, who collaborated in a BMBF-funded project around ten years ago, later founded her own start-up – which is now a cooperation partner in a new UAS project.
UAS set great store on the practical application of their research and teaching, where new developments are driven forward and good ideas are transformed into innovative products and services. The company Oculyze is currently demonstrating how well that can work: the founder of this start-up, Dr Katja Schulze, began her career at the Technical University of Applied Sciences (TH) Wildau, where she worked as a scientific employee as part of a BMBF-funded project and developed a system for the automatic recognition of plankton. This project was led by Professor Marcus Frohme, who still teaches and researches at the TH Wildau today.
Katja Schulze had thus found her research topic for the next few years during her first scientific project: automatic image recognition for detecting microorganisms and protozoa in microscopy. This subject offered enough material for her to successfully earn her doctorate and subsequently found a start-up, because there was potential for all possible applications. For example, her company’s repertoire includes automated counting of yeast cells for beer and wine production, which relieves the farmers and winegrowers from having to do this tedious workz by hand. Additionally, Oculyze GmbH is currently developing a system that farmers and veterinarians can use to quickly and easily determine whether cows are fertile. All of these products are based on a compact microscope along with a smartphone app and cloud server that evaluates the data – and of course they are based on the expertise of the founder with regard to the automatic recognition and counting of cells.
For the TH Wildau, and especially for Marcus Frohme, his continued contact with his former employee has paid off. Since July 2019, his team once again has an ongoing project within the Research at Universities of Applied Sciences programme (FHprofUnt funding line) that involves deep learning strategies for image recognition. And what would be more logical than including Oculyze GmbH as a business partner? The circle is complete: the expert knowledge that was grown at the UAS is fed back into the research conducted at the UAS.