Remote Setups - Let's help our students continue experiments from home

Let’s help our students continue their experiments from home

Without compromises or delays.

The Covid-19 pandemic is causing many students to suffer delays. Some small, some more threatening to the progress and even the value of their education and research. These students depend on experiments that can only be done in labs, to which they have limited access.

Introducing Remote Setups; experimental setups with a high degree of automation, that can be operated and monitored from home. This way, everybody can get back to work in the labs, while respecting the 1.5-meter rule. This is not just lab work in the ‘new normal’, it is the lab of the future.

Work from home, work together

By now, we’re all used to Teams-, Zoom- and Hangout-meetings. We’ve adapted to a situation nobody asked for as fast as we could. But for engineers and scientists, just talking and doing theory are not enough. Future engineers and scientists studying for their Master, Bachelor or PhD degree need to do experiments at a world-class level and in most cases need (international) collaborations to achieve their goals.

While still not a true substitute for real-life human interaction, Remote Setups do help. They will enable (international) students to resume working on their joint projects and will allow new collaborations. Working on an experiment together with colleagues from other universities, institutes or companies is almost as easy as sharing a screen in MS Teams.

Add a practical element to remote education and research

While we’re all doing our best to get the most out of remote education and work, what is now often missing is the option to visit and use the labs. Remote Setups can help: they allow students to perform the experiments from home. One person is present in the lab to perform small adjustments and to monitor the results and all the rest are at home working as they were in the lab. As close to real life and as safe as it can be under these bizarre circumstances.

Lessons for the future

With Remote Setups, we can continue to work remotely in the future, after Covid-19. It is a major step in reducing the need for much of the expensive, time-consuming and polluting travel. All parties involved in the research can have the same level of access to both the setups and the results. This will make remote setups the ideal solution for international collaborations with other scientists or with companies that will also benefit from real-time access to the experiments. Research will be more open and transparent with remote setups.

Less turns out to be more

During the lockdown we had one remotely controlled experimental setup. We learned something quite unexpected: the absence of people in the labs led to better, more consistent and more reliable results from our experiments. Less people mean less changes in temperature, lighting conditions, and other environmental variables and disturbances that influence sensitive measurements.

Productivity also went up noticeably as, with less people getting in each other’s way, this setup could be run 24/7 uninterrupted.

Contribute to the labs of the future!

We know this concept works. Our first and - currently - only setup proved that. But one is not enough. With your help we want to make 9 other setups remotely controlled. 10 setups will enable a group of 15 to 20 students - including PhD, Master and Bachelor students – and more senior researchers as postdocs, to keep working or educating at even a higher level than before the pandemic. These setups will also allow new collaborations with universities and companies across the globe.

Do you contribute to make the labs of the future a truly powerful reality?