Student project: Urine sensing - Literature research & validation

*Important for non-EU students: You'll need to be registered at a Dutch university to meet immigration requirements.

You will be part of a “leerwerkplaats” Zorgen voor Morgen, where experts in the field of urine sensing, healthcare professionals and technological experts collaborate with students to design the healthcare of the future.

What you will do

Background
OnePlanet Research Center is part of the ‘Zorgen voor Morgen’ project. This project aims to combine various technologies to shape the future of home care and care homes. In current home care and care homes, healthcare professionals receive many calls from clients every day, indicating that assistance is needed. However, only a small percentage of these calls are urgent calls, and the majority of these calls are related to small requests like changing a pillow or putting on shoes.

Currently, the healthcare professional can't distinguish high urgency from low urgency calls which makes it impossible for them to prioritize calls. In addition, there is no feedback to the clients after initiating the call, which leaves them in a waiting situation until a healthcare professional arrives, which often results in initiating another call. The current system results in stress for both the healthcare professional and the client. The Zorgen voor Morgen project aims to solve this by coupling smart home sensors to a hybrid “triage” system that, based on professional judgement, knows when to call or not call an active healthcare professional. This would lead to a more efficient healthcare solution where the healthcare professional has more personal time for each elderly client.

Your role
OnePlanet’s role in this project is to develop sensor solutions that can support healthcare professionals in monitoring the health of the elderly and making decisions on whether urgent care is needed. Our focus is on sensor solutions in the bathroom, for which we have developed a Smart Toilet. This smart toilet includes a smart toilet seat with sensors to measure physiological parameters light weight and heart rate, but it could also include sensors for urine measurements. We are currently developing optical technologies for non-invasive urine measurements.

With this internship, we would like to bring this research one step further by a) performing literature research on the usage of these optical techniques and b) comparing them to currently commercially available urine sensors. More specifically, your tasks as an intern would include:

• Systematically analyse literature on the optical technology usage for fluid biomarkers
• Write an academic report on this systematic review. The stretched goal would be to aim for a publication with you as the main author!
• Set up a pilot urine data collection study with a commercially available urine sensor and lab reference measurements (create a study design, write a study protocol, etc.)
• Conduct the data collection
• Perform statistical analysis and visualizations on the data collected
• Write a report about the findings in this study and make a comparison with the optical techniques

As outcome of the project, we are aiming to have:

• A systematic review of literature on optical technology usage for fluid biomarkers
• A results report on the findings of the study with the commercially available urine sensor and a comparison with the optical techniques 

What we do for you

You will be a student at OnePlanet Research Center, which is a multidisciplinary collaboration between Wageningen University & Research (WUR), Radboud University, Radboud UMC and nano-technology world-player imec. Your work here will not only be of academic relevance, but also translated to practical applications where possible. The insights you derive will be used in future Smart Toilet Seat studies and use cases.

With this internship, you will be in the unique position collaborating with healthcare professionals from Vilente, sensor developers as well as data scientists from Imec and students from other disciplines and domains. You will experience running a complete biomedical human study from ideation to execution, to analysis and interpretation. You will be part of a team where everyone has different backgrounds and subjects of expertise, which makes it fun to exchange perspectives and to work together.  

Who you are

• You are a MSc student in the field of Bomedical Engineering, Technical Medicine, Health Technology, Life Science, Biology, or related discipline.
• You are able to set up an conduct a human study and are familiar with study design principles, protocol writing and ethical considerations for human data collection.
• You are passionate about linking research to development.
• You have experience with literature research.
• You are able to work independently and manage multiple tasks.
• You speak Dutch and English.
• You are available for a period of 6 months, starting in February or March 2026.
• You are entitled to do an internship in the Netherlands. This means that you are either an EU/EEA citizen, or a non-EU/EEA citizen who is studying at a Dutch university and needs to do an internship as part of your studies. 

Interested

Does this position sound like an interesting next step in your career at imec? Don’t hesitate to submit your application by clicking on ‘APPLY’.
Should you have more questions about the job, you can contact jobs@imec.nl.