Holst Centre’s spinouts take electronics beyond the screens

At first sight, remote pregnancy monitoring, recyclable electronics and fighter-pilot safety have little in common. One concerns expectant mothers, another factory floors and waste streams, and the third the split-second decisions of pilots flying at high speed under extreme pressure.

Yet the three Holst Centre spinouts that took the stage at the annual Innovation Day shared a remarkably similar starting point. In each case, the problem is not simply a shortage of technology. It is that the technology people rely on is too rigid, too old or too distracting for the world in which it is used.

Bloomlife wants to move more prenatal care from the clinic into the home. TracXon is redesigning electronics so that they can be printed on flexible foil rather than built around rigid, resource-intensive circuit boards. And Touchwaves is building a new sensory channel for people who are already overwhelmed by screens, alarms and radio traffic.

Together, the three companies show what a research ecosystem such as Holst Centre is ultimately for: not only to create new technology, but to turn it into products that change how people are cared for, how things are made and how humans perform under pressure.

From a frightening hospital visit to pregnancy care at home

For Bloomlife’s Julien Penders, the starting point was deeply personal. Around a decade ago, his pregnant wife feared she was having contractions. They rushed to the hospital, only to learn later that it had been a false alarm.

The experience stayed with him. “The technology was first introduced in 1971 and really hasn’t been innovated since then,” Penders told the audience. By then, he had already spent years at Holst Centre working on wearable healthcare technology. His teams had developed early cardiac-monitoring patches and worked on projects that explored functions which would later become familiar in consumer wearables. The expertise was there: ultra-thin sensors, body-worn electronics, data processing and early manufacturing experience. The question was where it could make the biggest difference.

Julien Penders, Bloomlife, Holst Centre spinout, © Bram Saeys

Together with his co-founder, Penders repurposed that knowledge for pregnancy. Bloomlife initially focused on helping women track contractions and better gauge when a hospital visit was necessary. The company launched its first product in 2017 and, according to Penders, reached about 15,000 users before shifting its attention towards regulated clinical care.

Today, Bloomlife’s direction is more ambitious: helping healthcare providers monitor maternal and fetal health remotely, with data collected at home and reviewed by clinicians. Its MFM-Pro device has FDA clearance for maternal and fetal heart-rate monitoring in the United States. Bloomlife is positioning the technology as part of a broader remote-care programme for high-risk pregnancies, including support around conditions such as hypertension and diabetes.

For Penders, the bigger ambition is clear. Remote monitoring should not merely make existing care more convenient. It should help create a new standard in which pregnancy risks can be managed earlier, more continuously and without requiring every expectant mother to travel repeatedly to a clinic.

Rethinking the circuit board

Ashok Sridhar’s pitch began with an object so common that it has almost become invisible: the printed circuit board. PCBs are everywhere - in phones, cars, medical devices, appliances and industrial systems. But their ubiquity also creates a major sustainability problem. They are rigid, material-intensive and difficult to recycle. Their production relies on complex processes, while end-of-life electronics often remain a global waste challenge.

TracXon’s answer is flexible hybrid electronics. Instead of producing rigid boards through conventional processes, the Eindhoven company prints circuitry in an additive way on ultra-thin plastic foil. Components such as chips can then be assembled onto that flexible substrate, including in high-speed roll-to-roll manufacturing processes.

Ashok Sridhar, TracXon, Holst Centre spinout, © Bram Saeys

The result is electronics that can be lighter, thinner and more flexible than traditional circuit boards. It also changes the economics and environmental footprint of making them. “It is not a concept or a prototype,” Sridhar said. “This year and next year, we are scaling up multiple products for several B2B customers from 10 different countries.”

TracXon’s applications range from medical patches and vital-sign monitoring to automotive steering-wheel heating and sensing, logistics devices and sleep-apnoea monitoring. The company’s own production approach combines printed circuitry with component assembly, using both sheet-to-sheet and roll-to-roll methods.

The deeper promise is not simply that an existing device becomes greener. Flexible hybrid electronics can enable products that rigid boards cannot: electronics that bend with the body, fit onto curved surfaces, add sensing to large areas or become almost weightless.

Sridhar framed TracXon as a company that stands on a long research legacy. “We are able to see further because we stand on the shoulders of giants,” he said, referring to the work done at TNO and Holst Centre. The point was not nostalgic. Without years of work on printing, materials, electronics assembly and reliability, there would be no credible path from a promising foil-based prototype to scalable industrial production.

Giving pilots another sense

Touchwaves begins at the other end of the human-technology relationship. Its big question is not how to collect more data, but what happens when humans receive too much of it.

Charlotte Kjellander asked the audience to imagine a fighter pilot in a training scenario: pulling up through clouds, dealing with high G-forces, scanning screens, receiving radio messages, tracking threats and responding to alarms. At the critical moment, the pilot may still be technically skilled and highly trained - but cognitively overloaded.

Charlotte Kjellander, Touchwaves, Holst Centre spinout, © Bram Saeys

“Flashing screens, radio signals in your ear, and our human biological system cannot cope,” Kjellander said. Touchwaves is developing what it calls 'embodied haptics': a tactile interface integrated into clothing that communicates information through touch. Rather than adding another sound or visual warning, the system gives directional cues directly to the body. A pilot can feel where a threat is coming from, even when visual and auditory channels are already saturated.

The technology combines thin, stretchable electronics with knowledge of how touch affects cognition and performance under stress. It is designed to connect with multiple data sources in the cockpit, including aircraft systems, drone sensors and biosensors.

Kjellander said the technology has been validated with the Dutch Air Force and that Touchwaves is working with NATO air forces and aerospace manufacturers. The company sees aviation as its immediate focus, but not its final destination. The same logic may apply to many high-pressure environments where people must make decisions faster than their eyes and ears can process new information. “What we build is not optional,” Kjellander concluded. “It is urgent.”

The real spinout is a different way of working

What connects Bloomlife, TracXon and Touchwaves is not a shared product category. These are three very different businesses, serving very different markets. Their common ground is more fundamental.

Each company starts with a human limitation or industrial blind spot. Pregnancy care was still tied too closely to hospital equipment. Electronics were treated as disposable, rigid hardware. Pilots were being given more and more information through channels already pushed to their limits.

The response in all three cases is to make technology less visible, more integrated and more useful. In Bloomlife’s case, the sensor moves onto the body, and care moves closer to home. For TracXon, electronics become part of flexible materials rather than a rigid object at the centre of a device. For Touchwaves, information moves away from another screen and towards the nervous system itself.

Holst Centre’s next generation of spinouts is showing what the route can look like: technology that does not demand more attention from people, but fits better into their lives, bodies and work.