TU Delft Impact Contest

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Finalist

Lite

Creating high-quality, music-synchronized light shows is either very time-consuming, expensive, or both. Small venues can’t afford dedicated lighting operators and end up with generic or poorly timed lights, while large events spend huge amounts of time manually programming and time-coding shows. There’s a need for a tool that keeps creative control in human hands but removes the repetitive, technical work making it easier and faster to build, test, and run professional light shows at any scale.

Finalist

BioDetect Diapers

Urinary tract infections (UTIs) are one of the most frequent and impactful health issues among elderly people (in particular woman) living in long-term care facilities. This is the case due to atypical symptoms, cognitive decline, and Asymptomatic Bacteriuria (ASB), which on its way can lead to delayed diagnosis, inappropriate antibiotic use, and costly hospitalizations. This leads to unnecesasary discomfort and a decline in overall health. At the same time, caregivers are left managing frequent diaper changes, more complex care needs, and rising treatment costs. Which all could be prevented by earlier UTI diagnosis.

Finalist

LogicLayer

Industrial distributors process complex, high-stakes orders via messy "analog inbound", emails with blurry photos of rusted nameplates, 40-page foreign manuals, and hand-drawn sketches. Processing these manually means highly-paid sales engineers waste hours playing data-entry clerk just to extract basic specs. Because processing is chronological, a lucrative €50,000 engine order can sit unread while an engineer wastes 40 minutes deciphering a €500 pump request. This bottleneck costs companies major deals. Worse, generic AI cannot solve this because it hallucinates technical specs and poses massive data privacy risks when fed proprietary ERP data.

Finalist

Kolibair

Emergency response lasts hours. Today’s emergency drones last minutes. Fire, flood and search-and-rescue incident commanders need continuous live visibility over hotspots, access routes, searched areas and possible victim locations, yet current drone options force an unwanted compromise. Commercial multirotors are quick to deploy, yet typically fly only 25-40 useful minutes, lose 10-15 minutes per each battery swap, require constant operator attention and rely on manual operator reporting to commanders. Military UAVs and helicopters can cover more ground, but are too costly, complex and sparsely available for regular crews. The result is broken aerial intelligence exactly when lives depend on fast, informed decisions.

Finalist

Hydro-Guard

Protected natural areas face growing pressure from illegal exploitation such as poaching and illegal fishing. In many parks these activities are carried out by boat. For operators, boats are an important means of transport: faster than travel by land, independent of infrastructure, and capable of reaching remote areas. There are over 34,000 restricted-access protected areas worldwide. Out of our survey 90% struggles with boat-based exploitation, 87% of the parks are searching to improve boat monitoring. To date, there is no tool that maps boat traffic, even though it plays a dominant role in exploitation.

Spec2Solve

Researchers with deep domain knowledge waste time translating ideas into solver-ready optimization models: choosing variables, constraints, indices, and relaxations, then debugging feasibility and scaling. This “spec-to-code” gap causes slow iteration, fragile implementations, and modeling errors.

NeuroLearn

Traditional education follows a one-size-fits-all approach, despite students having different learning speeds, strengths, and weaknesses. As a result, students often practice skills they have already mastered, while struggling areas remain insufficiently addressed. Teachers also lack scalable tools to personalize learning for every student. To compensate, many families turn to private tutors, who are often expensive and not always aligned with the specific curriculum or learning goals. This leads to inefficient use of time, unequal access to support, and inconsistent learning outcomes. An affordable, adaptive solution is needed to personalize learning at scale.

Samen Hypotheek

Students and recent graduates face an extreme shortage of affordable housing, making individual homeownership nearly impossible. While buying a home collectively with a group of friends is a viable solution, the financial, legal, and organizational barriers are incredibly high. Traditional mortgages and legal frameworks are not suited for multi-owner group structures. This leaves young adults locked out of the housing market, unable to build equity or secure stable living conditions during a crucial phase of their lives.

STACKED

Students struggle to eat well, not because they lack awareness, but because their environment makes healthy choices difficult. Time is limited, cooking feels complicated, fresh ingredients spoil quickly, and nutrition advice is overwhelming. Affordable options are often unhealthy, while healthier options require planning, knowledge, and effort. As a result, students default to what is fastest and easiest rather than what is balanced or nutritious. The core need is not more information about healthy eating, but a practical system that removes friction and makes balanced meals simple, accessible, and achievable within the realities of student life.

fevy.app

Planning and sharing social events today is fragmented and inefficient. Event details are scattered across calendars, messaging apps, and platforms, forcing people to manually copy information, chase updates, and miss changes. Existing tools separate private and public events and rely on outdated sharing models, while informal social gatherings remain unmanaged or undiscovered. As a result, organizers waste time coordinating, participation drops, and newcomers struggle to access local social and cultural life.

Jasmijn Zwerver

Jacob Perk