CEO & Founder, Top 100 Women of the Future | AI, Web3, Metaverse - Advisor & Deep Tech Investor | Keynote Speaker | Masterclass | Master Human-Centric Tech Transformation

20,000+ leaders trained. 20+ years in the boardroom. One focus: helping leaders make AI decisions they won't regret.

I bridge AI, healthcare, finance & ethics for leaders navigating technology's human impact.

Most innovation conversations focus on what technology can do. The harder work is understanding what it should do — and who bears the consequences when it doesn't.

My work sits at that intersection.

𝗪𝗵𝘆 𝗹𝗲𝗮𝗱𝗲𝗿𝘀 𝘁𝗿𝘂𝘀𝘁 𝗺𝗲
I've sat where you sit.
→ Board member: Generali Switzerland, Europe Assurance
→ Former boards: UniCredit, BlackRock
→ 20+ years as executive at UBS and AXA
→ Co-author: Fast Future Blurs (Wiley)

From UBS innovation to Generali strategy rooms, I've spent my career inside highly regulated systems where progress, trust, and responsibility must move together.

𝗥𝗲𝗰𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗸
→ Davos Innovation Week— Moderated for 4 consecutive years (Fintech, Emerging Tech, AI)
→ Forbes Switzerland Award Jury member and Moderator 2025
→ FIBE Berlin 24/25  — Exclusive Behind the scene Influencer, Europe's leading fintech festival
→ Aeon Life collaboration — preventive healthcare, full-body MRI, AI- enabled early detection 
→ Co-Author Foresight Paper Future Beyond Our times (The World in 2125
→ Co-Author White papers EU AI Act 2024 (Germany), 2025 (Switzerland. 
→ Co-founder, Fast Future Executive Faculty — speed-biased learning for C-level leaders
→ Host, Edge of Tomorrow — conversations with technologists, ethicists, and humanists

𝗥𝗲𝗰𝗼𝗴𝗻𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻

Peace Ambassador nominee — United Nations Peace Foundation (2024–2025)
Senator for Switzerland — World Business Angels Investment Forum
Board Member of the World Smart Cities Economic Development Commission
Top 5 Women in Tech in Europe
Top 100 Women in Business in Switzerland — twice
World's Top 200 Business & Technology Innovators
LinkedIn Top Voice 24/25 | 143,000+ followers

𝗠𝘆 𝗳𝗼𝗰𝘂𝘀

Not hype. Clarity.

→ Ethical ROI in medtech and fintech
→ Human dignity in AI and scientific breakthroughs
→ Access and equity in healthcare innovation
→ Progress measured by impact, not just scale

𝗠𝘆 𝗯𝗲𝗹𝗶𝗲𝗳
Technology alone won't save us. We will — if we lead wisely.

𝗪𝗼𝗿𝗸 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝗺𝗲

🎤 𝗞𝗲𝘆𝗻𝗼𝘁𝗲𝘀 — I speak globally at conferences and universities. DM "KEYNOTE" for speaking enquiries. 

🏛️ 𝗕𝗼𝗮𝗿𝗱 𝗿𝗼𝗹𝗲𝘀 — Open to selective non-executive positions where responsible technology and strong governance are central.

Dr. Martha Boeckenfeld

A 17-year-old just made $450,000 prosthetic arms cost $300.

No surgery. No brain implants. Just thinking makes it move.

Benjamin Choi watched amputees face an impossible choice: Basic hooks for $10,000. Or mind-controlled arms requiring brain surgery and a half-million dollars.

He built a third option in his bedroom.

The breakthrough that changes everything:
↳ Cost: $300 vs $450,000 (1,500x cheaper)
↳ Surgery: Zero. Two electrodes on skin
↳ Accuracy: 95% vs industry's 74%
↳ Code: 23,000 lines by one teenager

Think about that.

A high school student solved what billion-dollar companies called impossible. With YouTube tutorials, a $75 3D printer, and 6 volunteers who believed in him.

He collected their brainwaves while they imagined moving their hands. Trained AI to recognize the patterns. Then compressed everything onto a $30 chip. No cloud. No WiFi. Just local intelligence responding to human thought.

The arm withstands 4 tons of force. Users control it by thinking, blinking, or nodding. Whatever works for their body.

Seven new algorithms. 978 pages of mathematics. One teenager who refused to accept that amputees should choose between bankruptcy and basic function.

But here's what stopped me cold:

Benjamin made it open source. No patents. No exclusive licenses. Just posted the blueprints online. Download, print, assemble. Think to move.

The Multiplication Effect:

1 teenager = breakthrough innovation
100 builders inspired = global access
1,000 affordable arms = dignity restored
At scale = disability redefined

Watch what happens when you remove every barrier. No surgeon needed. No insurance battles. No waiting lists. 

Just human potential meeting human need.

Selected as a top 40 Regeneron Science finalist. Biomedical engineers studied his work and admitted: the student had become the teacher.

The future of healthcare isn't in protecting price tags.

It's in teenagers who see suffering and choose to solve it.

Follow me, Dr. Martha Boeckenfeld for innovations that make the impossible affordable.

♻️ Share to spread hope to 2 million people living with limb loss.

#Innovation #Prosthetics #AccessibleTech #AI

Board & Executive Advisor on AI Accountability and Human Impact Former Fortune 500 finance executive helping leaders make responsible decisions before risk, regulation or reputation force the issue

Doctors told millions of people their knee cartilage was gone for good. A small molecule just proved them wrong in mice—and in human tissue.

Think about that.

Osteoarthritis affects roughly 20% of the U.S. population. Millions of knee and hip replacements every year. For decades, the standard answer has been: manage the pain, delay the inevitable, replace the joint.

The long-held assumptions:
 ↳ Once cartilage wears down, it doesn't come back
 ↳ Chondrocytes lose their regenerative capacity with age
 ↳ Joint replacement is the only real solution for end-stage disease
 ↳ Damage is permanent

What Stanford researchers found instead:
 ↳ An enzyme called 15-PGDH rises in aging joints and breaks down PGE2, a molecule that supports tissue repair
 ↳ Block that enzyme, and existing cartilage cells reprogram toward a younger gene-expression profile
 ↳ In aged mice, the drug regrew smooth, load-bearing hyaline cartilage—not scar tissue
 ↳ After ACL-type injuries, treated mice kept thicker cartilage and better movement

Here's the part that stopped me:

Human cartilage from end-stage joint replacements—tissue that had clinically "failed"—responded to the same treatment in the lab. It started forming new articular cartilage.

Tissue we'd written off still had dormant regenerative capacity. It just needed the right signal to wake up.

The path forward:
An oral version of this 15-PGDH inhibitor (MF-300) has already passed Phase 1 safety testing in humans for age-related muscle weakness. The same biological axis underlies both muscle and cartilage aging.

No osteoarthritis patients have been treated yet. But the door is open.

The ripple effect:
 1 study proves cartilage can regenerate in aged tissue
 10 replications means it's real
 100 patients in trials means we learn if it works in humans
 At scale = millions of people might keep their original knees

We spent decades accepting that worn joints only get worse.

This research asks a different question: what if the cells were waiting for permission to rebuild?

Follow me, Dr. Martha Boeckenfeld, for breakthroughs where science rewrites what we thought was permanent.

♻️ Share if you believe regenerative medicine deserves more attention—and more funding.

Sources: Blau, H. M., & Bhutani, N. (2026, January 3). Anti-aging injection regrows knee cartilage and prevents arthritis. SciTechDaily.

Singla, M., Wang, Y. X., Monti, E., Bedi, Y., Agarwal, P., Su, S., Ancel, S., Hermsmeier, M., Devisetti, N., Pandey, A., Bakooshli, M. A., Palla, A. R., Goodman, S., Blau, H. M., & Bhutani, N. (2025). Inhibition of 15-hydroxy prostaglandin dehydrogenase promotes cartilage regeneration. Science.

A Norwegian family spent four decades pumping oil from the seabed.
 
Now they’re pumping drinking water from 600 meters under the ocean.
 
Think about that.
 
Norway is one of the most water-rich countries on Earth. And yet a family-owned subsea engineering company just built the world’s first commercial-scale underwater desalination plant.
 
The shift didn’t come from a startup.
 
It came from redirecting 40 years of North Sea expertise.
 
Conventional desalination has always required trade-offs:
 ↳ Massive coastal infrastructure
 ↳ Energy-hungry high-pressure pumps
 ↳ Chemical pretreatment that contaminates brine discharge
 ↳ Land use that competes with communities
 
What this team built instead looks very different:
 ↳ Subsea pods sitting 500+ meters below the surface
 ↳ Natural ocean pressure pushing water through membranes
 ↳ 40–50% lower energy consumption
 ↳ Chemical-free brine diluted to ambient salinity within 30 meters
 ↳ 95% less land use
 
At that depth, there’s almost no sunlight.
No algae. No bacteria.
 
The ocean does the pretreatment for free.
 
This matters beyond the engineering.
 
2–3 billion people already face water stress. Coastal cities are watching aquifers deplete while conventional desalination remains too expensive, too energy-intensive, or too damaging to marine ecosystems.
 
This technology doesn’t just produce water.
 
It removes the trade-off that kept desalination out of reach.
 
The numbers are straightforward:
 ↳ One module supplies 37,500 people’s daily water needs
 ↳ Cost per liter is roughly half of conventional desalination
 ↳ First water expected in the first half of 2026
 
At scale, the implication is bigger than water.
One module can support a small city.
 
At scale, water security becomes an engineering choice, not a diplomatic vulnerability.
 
Here’s the part leadership teams should sit with:
 
This didn’t come from Silicon Valley.
 
It came from a family that spent decades mastering hostile environments for oil and gas.
 
Same expertise.
Different direction.
 
We talk about legacy industries as if they’re the problem. 
 
But the companies that know how to operate under extreme pressure, in corrosive environments, with zero tolerance for failure may be best positioned to solve the crises we’re still debating in boardrooms.
 
The real strategic question isn’t just “what’s our transition plan?”
 
It’s whether the capabilities you’ve spent decades building could solve problems you haven’t been asked to solve yet.
 
For decades, desalination meant trading marine damage for human survival.
 
A better question: what happens when legacy expertise finds a new purpose — and who moves first?

♻️ Share with leaders in legacy industries going through a transition — the next chapter may already be in your capabilities.

Source: Flocean (Mongstad, Norway). First commercial subsea desalination plant, operational 2026.

Two teenagers asked a question most scientists wouldn’t think to ask: what if sound could clean water?

Think about that.

Microplastics are everywhere. In our bloodstreams. In unborn babies. In the water we drink. Most particles are so small they slip through even the finest filters.​

In a small community near Houston, two high schoolers from The Woodlands, Texas — Victoria Ou and Justin Huang — stared at cloudy water samples. 

No government lab. No corporate funding. Just curiosity and a bold hypothesis.​

What water filtration usually requires:
↳ Expensive membranes that clog and fail
​↳ Chemical treatments with side effects
​↳ Massive infrastructure
↳ Budgets most communities can’t afford

What these teenagers built instead:
↳ High‑frequency ultrasound waves tuned to push microplastics away from the water outflow​
↳ A “wall of sound” that forces particles into a tight region, like iron filings around a magnet​
↳ Once concentrated, the plastics become much easier to block and collect
↳ A pen‑sized device—compact, low‑power, and designed to be affordable if scaled​

Here’s the part that stopped me:
In lab tests, their prototype removed around 84–94% of suspended microplastics in a single pass. No chemicals. No expensive membranes. Just physics.​

Their project, “Acoustic Filtration: Harnessing Ultrasonic Technology for the Streamlined Removal of Microplastic Particles from Water Flow,” earned them the $50,000 Gordon E. Moore Award at Regeneron ISEF 2024 and international recognition. 

But the real breakthrough is what it opens: a realistic path toward removing the plastics we can’t see from the water we drink.​

Picture a village in a remote region. No access to industrial filtration. A small, affordable ultrasound device integrated into a local system, using sound waves to strip invisible pollution from the only water source they have. 

That’s the vision sitting behind this innovation — still early‑stage, but full of potential.​

We spent decades building billion‑dollar filtration systems.

Two teenagers, Victoria and Justin, asked a simpler question: what if we let sound do the work?

Follow me, Dr. Martha Boeckenfeld, for innovations where young minds rewrite what’s possible.

♻️ Share if you believe the future of clean water might come from your own curiosity. 

Resources: Huang & Ou (Regeneron ISEF 2024) – “Acoustic Filtration: Harnessing Ultrasonic Technology for the Streamlined Removal of Microplastic Particles from Water Flow”
​
ACS ES&T Water – “A Novel Application of Ultrasound for Removal of Aqueous Microplastics” (2025)
​

​

A college student with quadriplegia types math equations with her tongue.

No surgery. No headgear. Just a retainer.

She’s studying math and computer science. She takes notes in class, texts friends, and researches assignments—often in places where voice control isn’t an option. Libraries. Lectures. Group study rooms.

The device is MouthPad^, built by MIT spin-off Augmental. It’s a custom 3D-printed retainer that sits on the roof of your mouth and turns tongue movement into cursor control.

Think about what assistive tech usually asks people to accept:
 ↳ Surgical implants, recovery time, and real risk
 ↳ Visible headgear that turns you into “the person with the device”
 ↳ Voice commands that fail the moment the room needs to be quiet
 ↳ Price tags that put independence out of reach

What Augmental built instead:
 ↳ A touchpad for the tongue: swipe to move, press to click
 ↳ Head-tracking for broad motion, tongue reserved for precise control
 ↳ Bluetooth pairing like a normal mouse—no special software
 ↳ $1,500 during early access
 ↳ Users wearing it up to 9 hours a day with low fatigue

Here’s the part that stopped me.

Her mother called receiving the MouthPad^ “the most significant moment since her injury.” 

Not the diagnosis. 

Not the rehab milestones. 

A dental retainer that gave her daughter control back—without making her life louder, more visible, or more medical.

In a lecture hall, no one knows she’s controlling her laptop. 
That’s not a side benefit. 
That’s the design.

For boards and executive teams, this isn’t a feel-good edge case. It’s governance. When non-invasive, low-cost accessibility exists and organisations still choose systems that shut people out, the issue stops being “technology limits” and becomes leadership. Procurement standards, inclusion policy, and digital decisions determine who gets full access—and who is left working around choices made for them. That’s when accessibility stops being a design preference and becomes an accountability issue.

And it raises a blunt question:

Why did we spend decades trying to restore digital access by opening skulls when a workable interface might already be inside the mouth?

♻️ Share if you think accessibility shouldn’t require surgery—just better design.

This is one of the stories from my keynote on Designing Accessible Futures: AI, Ethics and Inclusion in Practice for boards and leadership teams.

Source: MIT News and Augmental (MouthPad^ assistive technology).

Video Insta luminica.ai

Mice paralysed by stroke regained function after one injection.

If this works in humans, not trying will no longer be a neutral decision.

Think about that.

A single IV dose. No surgery. No implant.

Just peptides that cross into damaged brain tissue and assemble their own scaffolding at the injury site.

Northwestern researchers developed a nanomaterial made of “dancing molecules”.
Therapeutic peptides that mimic the signals neurons need to survive and regrow.

Here’s why this matters beyond the lab:

Stroke care today restores blood flow.
It does not preserve function.
Doctors reopen a blocked artery.
Lives are saved.

Then a second wave of damage follows, inflammation, oxidative stress, immune overreaction.

The outcome is survival with loss.
This therapy is designed to intervene at that exact moment.

When the blood–brain barrier is most permeable.
When damage is still unfolding.

For decades, stroke care followed a simple logic:

Restore circulation and accept the damage that follows.
That logic made sense when regeneration was impossible.
It becomes a liability the moment it isn’t.

Here’s the part that should slow decision-makers down:

The same platform previously reversed paralysis in mice with severe spinal cord injuries.
That work has already received FDA Orphan Drug Designation.

This is not a single result.
It is a platform approaching human accountability.

If regeneration is possible but not pursued,
-who owns the outcome?

If function could have been preserved but wasn’t,
-what becomes indefensible in hindsight?

For decades, medicine accepted that once brain tissue is lost, it’s gone.

A more consequential question is now unavoidable:

When preservation becomes possible,
-who is responsible for deciding whether it is attempted?

Follow me, Dr. Martha Boeckenfeld, for breakthroughs that surface the decisions leaders will be accountable for long after the technology is deployed.

♻️ Share with those responsible for determining not just whether lives are saved, but whether irreversible loss is accepted by default.

Source: Northwestern University, Feinberg School of Medicine. PubMed: PMID 41506958.

A 17-year-old mixed algae in a small lab hidden on his grandfather’s Hudson Valley vineyard.
 
It grabbed wet tissue and wouldn’t let go.
 
That experiment turned into VetiGel: a plant-based gel that seals wounds and helps blood clot.
 
Trauma care’s hard problem:
Severe bleeding is the leading cause of preventable trauma death.
 
A major arterial bleed can kill in 3–5 minutes.
 
Most products need firm pressure, the right wound shape, and time.
 
Deep, jagged wounds are tough to pack.
 
What Joe built:
-A gel that seals fast and triggers clotting
-No manual pressure
-Stops bleeding in under 20 seconds
-Works on skin and organs
 
The proof: In veterinary surgery on 16 dogs, VetiGel cut blood loss from 78 mL to 6.7 mL. Time to hemostasis dropped from 25 minutes to under 2.
 
Cresilon later created TraumaGel for humans. It’s FDA cleared.
 
It made Time’s “Best Inventions of 2025.” 
 
The Department of Defense signed on.
 
Picture an earthquake. A mother pinned under rubble, bleeding from a deep wound. No ambulance for 40 minutes. A responder applies gel. The bleeding stops. 

She’s still alive when rescue arrives.

We spent decades accepting some bleeds are too fast and too deep to stop in time. A kid in a vineyard lab didn’t accept that.

Follow me, Dr. Martha Boeckenfeld, for stories where curiosity changes medicine.

♻️ Share if you think big medical advances can start  everywhere. We just need imagination! 

This is my find for YOU on the the last Day of 2025 to show, how  human imagination is saving lives!

Human-Centric AI & Future Tech | Keynote Speaker & Board Advisor | Healthcare + Fintech | Generali · Ex-UBS · AXA

A man carved a shelter inside a fallen giant tree.
30 days. No power tools. No architecture degree.

Just hands — and engineering older than any university.

Think about that.

Viral bushcraft creators are turning massive fallen logs into hidden homes — excavating, reinforcing, and weatherproofing structures using techniques their ancestors knew.

Load distribution along the trunk.
Natural arch shapes for strength.
Drainage carved into the base.
Insulation from bark and clay.

Civil engineering, taught by the forest.

What many modern organisations still assume about building capability:
 ↳ Learning happens in classrooms with textbooks
 ↳ Simulations replace real-world experience
 ↳ People need expensive labs to understand physics
 ↳ Theory must come before practice

What hands-on builders prove instead:
 ↳ 92% of educators report better math mastery through environment-based learning
 ↳ 97% of teachers see improved problem-solving from place-based curricula
 ↳ Hands-on engineering tasks score 4.23 out of 5 for knowledge construction
 ↳ People who build solve problems faster than those who only study theory

And yet most organisations still train people away from the environments where real judgment is formed.

Here’s the part that stopped me:

These builders aren’t cutting live trees.
They’re transforming decay into protection.

A fallen giant that would rot for decades becomes shelter, classroom, and proof that nothing has to be wasted.

That’s circular design thinking — taught without a single lecture.

Every beam placed teaches load distribution.
Every joint sealed reveals material behaviour.
Every drainage channel carved demonstrates hydrology.

The Multiplication Effect:

1 hands-on project = 3 semesters of theory come alive
 10 outdoor programs = communities of problem-solvers
 100 schools adopting = engineering education transformed

At scale = a generation that learns by building, not just reading.

The real risk isn’t lack of intelligence —
 it’s leaders who’ve never had to test their understanding against reality.

We spent decades making capability abstract.

A better question for leaders:
do we keep designing systems that teach theory in isolation —
or ones that produce judgment through contact with reality?

Worth reflecting on how we develop real capability.

Video source: Unknown and might be AI generated. Similar bushcraft builds on YouTube, TikTok, and Facebook show single builders creating shelters under roots or on top of giant fallen trees, often with basic hand tools and no heavy machinery.

Evidence that environment‑based learning leads to higher math and science scores and better problem‑solving than traditional classrooms. (WWF “Schools for Nature”, 2019; Becker et al., Frontiers in Psychology, 2022; Gray Family Foundation, “Empirical Evidence Supporting Benefits of Outdoor School”, 2015)

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Razali Samsudin

An axolotl lost its leg. Four weeks later, it had a new one—bones, nerves, muscles, skin. Perfect.

Think about that.

For decades, scientists assumed this kind of regeneration was unique to salamanders. A biological trick humans could never access.

Then researchers cracked the axolotl genome. What they found rewrote the story.

What we assumed about human healing:
↳ Once tissue is damaged, it scars over permanently
↳ Regenerative capacity disappears after embryonic development
↳ Complex regrowth requires biological machinery humans don't have
↳ Limbs, hearts, spinal cords—once lost, gone forever

What the research shows instead:
↳ Humans share the same Shox gene that directs limb growth in axolotls
↳ Retinoic acid signaling pathways—key to regeneration—exist in both species
↳ The basic architecture for complex regrowth is conserved across vertebrates
↳ The code is there. It's just not activated.

Here's the part that stopped me:

The primary barrier isn't missing genes. It's scar tissue. When humans are injured, our bodies prioritise rapid sealing over regrowth. Scarring effectively silences the regenerative program that axolotls keep running.

Scientists are now investigating how to bypass this "scar barrier"—reactivating dormant pathways involving genes like Catalase and FETUB that could reprogram wound sites toward regeneration instead of scarring.

The ripple effect:
A decoded genome proves the machinery exists
10 pathways identified = targets for intervention
100 patients in trials = we learn if humans can regenerate
At scale = spinal cord injuries, organ damage, and joint destruction become treatable—not terminal

Picture someone with a severed spinal cord. Today: permanent paralysis. Tomorrow: cells that remember how to rebuild.

We spent decades accepting that human bodies only scar.

A better question: what if our cells were waiting for permission to regenerate?

Follow me, Dr. Martha Boeckenfeld, for stories where science rewrites what we thought was permanent.

♻️ Share if you believe the future of medicine is already written in our genome—we just need to learn how to read it.

Resource: Nowoshilow, S., Schloissnig, S., Fei, J. F., Dahl, A., Pang, A. W., Pippel, M., & Tanaka, E. M. (2018). The axolotl genome and the evolution of key tissue formation regulators. Nature.

A 10-year-old walked 20 minutes on a treadmill. Her brain lit up differently for the rest of the school day.

Think about that.

Hillman et al. ran a study with 20 children. One day: 20 minutes of moderate walking. Another day: sitting quietly. After walking, EEG showed larger P3 brain-wave amplitudes and shorter latencies—markers of faster cognitive processing and sharper attention.

They also performed better on academic tests. Not slightly. Measurably.

What we've assumed about brain health:
↳ It requires intense exercise or expensive interventions
↳ Cognitive sharpness is mostly genetic
↳ Kids just need to sit still and focus

What the research shows instead:
↳ 20 minutes of walking changes cortical rhythms in real time
↳ Interrupting prolonged sitting boosts cerebral blood flow and executive function
↳ Higher habitual physical activity links to larger hippocampal and basal ganglia volumes
↳ Nature walks let executive attention rest—urban walks demand more frontal control

Here's what stopped me:

I took a walk at the beach last week. No agenda. No podcast. Just the ocean, birdsong, and my own footsteps. By the time I returned, the problem I'd been struggling with for days had an answer. My mind had done the work while my body moved.

That's not anecdote. It's neuroscience. EEG studies show nature walks reduce frontal midline theta activity—the brain's way of stepping off the treadmill of constant control.

The problem:
↳ More than half of US adults fail to meet physical activity guidelines
↳ Europeans sit 7–8 hours daily in car-dependent, office-based lives
↳ Higher sedentary time correlates with poorer fluid intelligence and memory

The design question:
When cities prioritise cars over people, they're designing in lower baseline attention and creativity. When they build walkable streets, protected bike lanes, and accessible public transport, ordinary trips become quiet upgrades for the brain.

Picture a child who walks to school through tree-lined streets instead of sitting in a car. Those 20–40 minutes of gentle movement become a built-in cognitive primer—not an optional workout.

We spent decades asking how to boost brain performance.

A better question: what if we just designed cities that let people walk?

Follow me, Dr. Martha Boeckenfeld, for stories where science meets how we live.

♻️ Share if you believe better brain health should be built into our streets, not just our schedules.

Source: Hillman, C. H., Pontifex, M. B., Raine, L. B., Castelli, D. M., Hall, E. E., & Kramer, A. F.. The Effect of Acute Treadmill Walking on Cognitive Control and Academic Achievement in Preadolescent Children. Pediatrics.

Nature solved some of our hardest engineering problems long before we named them.

A European robin migrates thousands of kilometres with a brain smaller than a pea.

No satellites.
No batteries.
No infrastructure.

Just biology.

For a long time, that sounded like a fun fact.
It’s actually a design lesson.

The robin navigates using a quantum compass in its eyes.

When light hits a protein called cryptochrome, electrons briefly enter a quantum-entangled state.

That state lasts around 100 microseconds.

In early laboratory conditions, that’s roughly what our quantum experiments achieved.

The difference is where it happens.

The bird does this:
At room temperature
In a wet, chaotic biological environment
While flying through storms

Meanwhile, we spend billions trying to stabilise quantum systems in supercooled, tightly controlled labs.

Same challenge.

Very different approaches.

Human navigation depends on:
Satellites orbiting 20,000 km above Earth
Global ground stations
Continuous power
Constant maintenance

Nature’s version depends on:
A single protein
No external infrastructure
No updates
No downtime

When researchers disrupted this system with extremely weak radio noise, the birds became disoriented.

Not because the signal was strong.

Because the system was precise.

Here’s the part that matters beyond biology:

Capital doesn’t solve complexity.

Understanding does.

We often try to scale effort to overcome hard problems.

Nature redesigns the system so less effort is needed in the first place.

That distinction shows up everywhere:
Products that scale without fragility
Teams that outperform their size
Strategies that compound instead of collapse
I
f you’re building something where leverage matters more than headcount or budget, this question is worth sitting with:

Are you adding more…
or are you redesigning the system?

Because the most durable breakthroughs rarely come from doing more.
They come from seeing the problem differently.

If you work in strategy, innovation, or leadership, this is the lens I keep coming back to when decisions get complex.

Source video insta @rootxdeep

A burn survivor is growing new skin from a biopsy the size of a postage stamp.

No donor wounds.
No rigid scars.
Skin that moves with her body.

Think about that, 

After the Crans-Montana fire on New Year’s Eve—40 killed, more than 80 survivors, many with burns over 60% of their bodies—Swiss doctors had to choose fast.

Do they stick with standard grafting?

Or use regenerative medicine now, knowing delay can lock patients into years of damage?

Traditional burn care means harvesting large areas of healthy skin. You create new wounds to patch old ones. Patients endure rounds of grafts, tight scarring that restricts movement, and repeat surgeries to release contractures.

denovoSkin takes a different route:
A bilayer graft grown from the patient’s own cells.
A tiny biopsy grown into large sheets with both epidermis and dermis.

The key detail: the graft is meant to grow with the patient.

A 19-year-old shouldn’t need decades of revisions. The skin is intended to integrate for good, heal with minimal scarring, and move with the body instead of pulling against it.

What studies report so far:
 ↳ big expansion from a tiny biopsy
 ↳ fewer donor-site wounds
 ↳ less contracture and tight scarring
 ↳ better long-term function and appearance

None of this was certain when the first patients were treated.

At least a dozen of the most severely injured young adults are now receiving—or being prepared for—treatment at centers working with CUTISS.

A Europe-wide Phase 3 trial is running across eight countries. First results are expected by the end of 2026.

If this becomes routine care won’t hinge only on the science. It will hinge on how fast hospitals, regulators, and payers move when the data is still early, but the cost of waiting is permanent.

One trial shows it works.
A handful of centers copy the protocol.
Enough patients get treated that “experimental” starts to sound like “standard.”

For decades, we treated severe burns as a life sentence of visible scars.

So here’s the question: when does “experimental” stop being a reason to wait—and start being a reason to act?

Source: Image adapted from CUTISS. University of Zurich news release:
“New Skin for Burn Victims” – Universität Zürich (UZH News), 15 Jan 2026.

She calls it her “kick-ass robot arm.”

Two years ago, Sarah de Lagarde slipped into the gap between a train and the platform at a London station.

Two trains hit her. She lost her right arm and right leg. She lay on the tracks for what felt like forever before anyone found her.

Sit with that.

Sarah didn’t just make it through that night.

She rebuilt.

Today she walks on a prosthetic leg and uses a bionic hand that learns her patterns. She speaks at TEDx. She’s a visible advocate for safer, more inclusive cities.

What prosthetics often meant for many users:
 ↳ A few basic grips
 ↳ Heavy, clunky hardware
 ↳ Clinic visits for every tweak
 ↳ Enough hassle that many quit

What Sarah’s COVVI Hand does instead:
 ↳ 24+ grips she can set up from her phone
 ↳ Strong enough to lift about 30 kg across the fingers
 ↳ Remote updates — no clinic required
 ↳ Light enough to wear all day

The numbers behind it:
 ↳ 700+ patients globally using COVVI hands
 ↳ 500+ components in each device
 ↳ Remote updates mean the same hand improves over time
 ↳ An NHS partnership aimed at making advanced prosthetics easier to access

Here's what got me: 

Sarah isn’t just wearing tech.

She’s using it to be heard.

Her message isn’t blame. It’s action: what if AI on CCTV could spot someone in trouble? What if platform design made falls less likely in the first place? What if the same thinking that built her arm helped build safer stations?

The multiplier:
 1 bionic hand = independence back
 10 platform fixes = hundreds of falls avoided
 100 safety systems = real-time detection across a network
 Big enough = cities that work for everyone

A few weeks before her accident, Sarah climbed Mount Kilimanjaro.

Now she’s climbing a different one — turning her worst night into a plan for what comes next.

For decades, we treated certain risks as “just part of city life.”

So here’s the question: what changes when survivors don’t only recover, but help redesign the systems that failed them?

Source: Video @insta. COVVI (bionic hand technology), Sarah de Lagarde (TEDx London Business School), NetApp/COVVI partnership data.

A man who can move only one finger built a profitable tech startup from his hospital bed.

Think about that.

Li Xia, 36, lives in Chongqing, China. Muscular dystrophy diagnosed at age five. By adulthood: paralyzed, ventilator-dependent, able to move only one finger and one toe. Formal schooling stopped at fifth grade.

In 2020, he fell into a coma. Doctors performed a tracheotomy and warned his family: survival chances were low.

He woke up. More limited than before. But his mind was intact.

What building a tech company usually requires:
 ↳ Engineering degree
 ↳ Physical access to equipment
 ↳ Mobility to visit sites and clients
 ↳ Hands to type, build, test

What Li Xia built instead:
 ↳ Self-taught programming, physics, and computer science through online courses
 ↳ A smart agriculture control system managing irrigation, nutrients, temperature, and humidity
 ↳ Remote operation of an entire farm from his bed
 ↳ Input method: a virtual keyboard controlled by one finger and one toe

His mother, Wu Dimei, became his hands.

Under his verbal instructions, she learned to solder control boards, run network wiring, connect circuits, and maintain equipment. She even assembled a remote-controlled vehicle to move produce around the farm.

No engineering background. Just a son explaining what needed to happen, and a mother refusing to let his vision stay trapped in his head.

The farm is now operating smoothly and turning a profit.

The multiplication effect:
 1 person proves a hospital bed isn't a barrier
 10 people with severe disabilities see what's possible
 100 accessible tools built = more minds unlocked
 At scale = we stop losing talent to physical limitations

We spent decades designing workplaces for bodies that move freely.

Li Xia asked a different question: what if technology could become my body?

A virtual keyboard. Networked sensors. A mother's hands. That's all it took to turn limitation into a functioning business.

The future of work isn't about who can show up.

It's about who refuses to be counted out.

Follow me, Dr. Martha Boeckenfeld, for stories where technology extends human possibility.

♻️ Share if you believe innovation should be accessible to every mind, regardless of body.

#Accessibility #Innovation #SmartAgriculture #TechForGood

Diana Spiridon

A ceramics studio in Rotterdam accidentally created urban ecosystems on apartment balconies.

No plants.
No soil.
No irrigation.

Just structure.

Think about that for a second.

They placed 3D-printed ceramic shapes on balconies to test form and drainage.

Then nature moved in.

First came moisture retention.

Then algae.
Then mosses.
Then insects.
Then pioneer plants.

Grey surfaces turned into tiny ecosystems without anyone planting a thing.

That experiment scaled into Urban Reef.

What conventional urban greening usually requires:
 ↳ Digging up existing infrastructure
 ↳ Irrigation systems and ongoing maintenance
 ↳ Soil, planters, and space cities don’t have
 ↳ Years of waiting for visible results

What Urban Reef built instead:
 ↳ Porous ceramic modules that slot into existing buildings
 ↳ Rainwater captured on-site, slowing runoff during storms
 ↳ Microclimates that passively cool surrounding air
 ↳ Thousands of niches where life colonises over time

This didn’t come from a government programme or a tech giant.

It came from a small ceramics studio paying attention to what happened when you gave nature the right structure.

Here’s the part that stopped me:

These structures are designed to get better with age.

Not despite weathering.
Because of it.

The more time passes, the more life moves in.
Infrastructure slowly becomes habitat.

The multiplication effect:
1 module = a few insects and mosses
 10 modules = a cooling corridor
 100 modules = stormwater managed, temperatures lowered, biodiversity restored
 At scale = cities that regenerate instead of degrade

Over 70% of people will live in cities by 2050.

For decades, we accepted that urban density and biodiversity were trade-offs.

A better question:

When surfaces regenerate cities, who approves the shift?

♻️ Share with urban planners, architects, and leaders rethinking what city infrastructure could become.

Source: Video insta @goinggreenmedia

Two people in a garden shed gave children free prosthetic arms.

That shouldn’t be inspiring.
It should be uncomfortable.

Because for decades, we’ve been told innovation in healthcare requires funding rounds, patents, and scale decks.

Drew Murray and Stephen Davies ignored all of that.

From a shed in the U.K., they built Team UnLimbited and started 3D-printing prosthetic hands and arms for children, at no cost to families.
No VC.

No regulation theatre.
No permission.
Just execution.

What the prosthetics industry has treated as unavoidable:
 ↳ $10,000–$80,000 for a single limb
 ↳ Replacements every 3–5 years
 ↳ Growing children needing new fittings every 12–18 months
 ↳ Families forced to choose between debt and mobility

What two people quietly proved wasn’t inevitable:
 ↳ Open-source, 3D-printed prosthetics
 ↳ Materials cheap enough to reprint as kids grow
 ↳ Designs shared globally, not locked behind IP
 ↳ Children choosing colours and themes, not just coping

The most important detail isn’t the technology.
It’s this:
They didn’t patent it.
They gave it away.

Anyone. Anywhere. Parent, hospital, maker. Download the files. Print the limb. Help a child.

That decision collapses the story we’ve been told.
$80k limbs versus open-source files.
Closed systems versus shared designs.
Profit protection versus dignity at scale.

So this isn’t a manufacturing problem.
It’s a leadership one.

Boards signed off on these prices.
Executives defended them.
Regulators tolerated them.

And it took two people in a shed to show they were never inevitable in the first place.

♻️ Share if access > profit.

I had my brain scanned.

Not a routine MRI.

 An AI-enhanced one.

72 hours later, a digital twin of my brain landed on my phone.

That alone was unsettling.

The results came back clear.

No early indicators of Alzheimer’s.

No cancer.

Relief, obviously.

But that wasn’t what stayed with me.

A close friend of mine didn’t get that relief.

At first, the signs were easy to dismiss.

Lost keys.
Repeated questions.
Small lapses chalked up to stress.

Nothing alarming.
Until an AI-augmented MRI revealed early structural changes deep in her hippocampus.

That scan didn’t stop the disease.

But it changed everything that followed.

She gained time.

Time to plan while she still had clarity.
Time to adjust work, legal, and family decisions.
Time to enroll in a clinical trial that only accepts patients at the very earliest stage.

Instead of drifting into uncertainty, they moved forward with a plan.

That’s when the bigger picture hit me.

Today, 55 million people live with dementia globally.

By 2050, that number is projected to reach 150 million.

And yet most diagnoses still happen after symptoms disrupt daily life.

The technology to see earlier now exists.

AI-augmented MRI can detect structural brain changes years before symptoms appear.

For decades, brain health has been something we react to too late.

Now we don’t have to.

Which raises a harder question.

When early detection is possible, but not yet standard…

Who owns the decision to act?

I recorded a short video sharing what the experience was actually like
and why it changed how I think about preventive health.

Curious how others are thinking about this.

A woman who hasn't left her bed in years serves coffee in Tokyo every day.

Think about that.

Fumiko Miyoshi—known as Fuchan—has spinal muscular atrophy. Her muscles weaken and shrink over time. Her body doesn't move the way she wants it to.

But from her room, she controls a 4-foot robot at DAWN Avatar Robot Cafe. It walks, gestures, pours drinks. Her face appears on a screen mounted on its chest. She greets customers, takes orders, earns about 1,000 yen per hour—standard café wages.

She works from home. The robot works in Tokyo.

What employment usually requires:
 ↳ Physical presence
 ↳ Mobility to move through a workspace
 ↳ Hands to carry, pour, serve
 ↳ A body that shows up

What Ory Yoshifuji and his team built instead:
 ↳ OriHime-D robots with 14 joints, controlled remotely via eye-tracking, switches, or minimal movement
 ↳ Pilots operating from hospital beds, living rooms, care facilities across Japan
 ↳ Real-time interaction—customers see the pilot's face, hear their voice, have actual conversations
 ↳ Shifts that fit around medical appointments, fatigue, and pain flares

Here's the part that stopped me:

Fuchan's own words: "I feel most fulfilled and enriched when I'm working. I can forget about my body, which doesn't move as I want it to, and feel that I have meaning in my life and that I am connected to society."

That's not a robot replacing a worker. That's a person reclaiming her place in the world.

Some call it dystopian. A machine serving your latte. But look closer: the worker isn't replaced. She's inside the robot.

The ripple effect:
 1 café proves remote embodiment works
 10 locations means a new employment model
 100 pilots means income and community for people written off by the labor market
 At scale = we stop defining "employable" by what a body can do

We spent decades designing workplaces for people who could show up.

DAWN asks a different question: what if showing up didn't require your body at all?

Follow me, Dr. Martha Boeckenfeld, for stories where technology returns what disability took away.

♻️ Share if you believe work should be defined by what minds can do—not what bodies can't.

#Accessibility #FutureOfWork #Robotics #Inclusion

A researcher in Brisbane couldn’t import the bacteria he needed.

Australian biosecurity laws blocked it.

So he spent two years growing them himself.

Not for a startup.
Not for a pitch deck.
Not for a hype cycle.

Just to make infrastructure work better.

In 2010, Dr. Shihu Hu started with a 2-litre lab tank at the University of Queensland, trying to cultivate anammox bacteria. They’re notoriously slow-growing. 

They only survive under precise anaerobic conditions. 

Most facilities import them.

He couldn’t.

So he and a small group kept going quietly, for years, with a water utility and a university lab.

By 2017, they reached pilot scale.
By 2020, full rollout at Brisbane’s Luggage Point facility.

Australia’s first commercial anammox wastewater system.
Asia-Pacific’s first.

No disruption theatre.
No “reinventing cities” narrative.
Just execution.

The result:
Conventional nitrogen removal relies on energy-intensive aeration, heavy chemical use, and infrastructure designed for a different era.

What this system does instead:
↳ Uses bacteria that convert ammonium and nitrite directly to nitrogen gas, without oxygen
 ↳ Cuts energy use by ~60%
 ↳ Saves ~$500,000 AUD per year
 ↳ Increases capacity by 10% without new infrastructure
 ↳ Treats wastewater for ~800,000 people every day

Enough to fill 50 Olympic swimming pools.

It won the 2021 AWA Innovation Award.

And now the facility is biofarming bacteria for other utilities across Australia.

For decades, wastewater was treated as a problem to manage.

This project treated it as a system to optimise.

My take:

This is what good leadership usually looks like in real life.

Backing something that doesn’t photograph well.

Sticking with a decision before it’s easy to explain.

Letting the work compound quietly instead of trying to sell it early.

The breakthrough here wasn’t the science.

It was having the patience to let a good idea run its course.

That’s harder than it sounds. And it’s why it’s rare.

♻️ Share if this reflects how you make long-term calls.

Source video: @insta eco.medy and getinspired.app
Primary Case Study (2022): "Luggage Point ANITA Mox Sidestream Treatment" by Urban Utilities/Veolia/UQ in Water e-Journal (Australian Water Association).

105,000 women in Sweden just proved how we detect breast cancer.

Not with a new drug. 
Not with a new machine.

With a partnership.

One radiologist plus AI versus two radiologists working alone.

The largest randomized trial of medical AI ever conducted just delivered its verdict:
↳ 29% more cancers detected 
↳ 44% less workload for radiologists 
↳ No increase in false positives 
↳ 12% fewer interval cancers over two years

That last number matters most.

Interval cancers are the ones that appear between screenings. The aggressive ones. The ones that slip through.

In the AI-supported group, when interval cancers did appear, they were smaller. 

Less invasive. Less aggressive.

The tumors that would have been missed got caught at screening instead.

Think about that.

For decades, we've debated whether AI will replace doctors.

This trial answered a different question: What happens when AI becomes the second set of eyes that never gets tired?

Radiologists face burnout rates above 50%. Thousands of images. Subtle patterns. Perfect concentration required.

The MASAI trial didn't replace that expertise. It amplified it.

AI triaged which exams needed one reader versus two. Low-risk cases moved faster. High-risk cases got flagged.

Same radiologists. Same skills. Better outcomes. Less exhaustion.

This wasn't a pilot. It was Sweden's national screening program. Real patients. Real outcomes. Peer-reviewed evidence.

The technology question has been answered.

Now it's a governance question: Who decides when this becomes standard care—and how fast?

♻️ Share with leaders navigating AI adoption in healthcare — the evidence is no longer theoretical.

Source: Interval cancer, sensitivity, and specificity comparing AI‑supported mammography screening with standard double reading without AI in the MASAI study, The Lancet (Jan 2026), Kristina Lång et al., DOI: 10.1016/S0140‑6736(25)02464‑X.

Berater, Blogger und Referent für Kundenzentrierung

✨ Blogger | Themeninfluencer auf LinkedIn | Fokus: Customer Experience & gesellschaftlicher Wandel | Stimme für echte Kundenzentrierung

Ich bin davon überzeugt: Wer den Menschen wirklich zuhört, gestaltet bessere Produkte, stärkere Organisationen und eine nachhaltigere Gesellschaft.

Als Blogger und Themeninfluencer auf LinkedIn schreibe ich regelmässig über die Kraft der Kundenzentrierung – nicht als Schlagwort, sondern als Haltung. Dabei interessieren mich nicht nur die Bedürfnisse von Konsumenten, sondern auch die Erwartungen von Bürgerinnen, Mitarbeitenden und Gemeinschaften in einer sich rasant verändernden Welt.

Meine Beiträge verbinden Perspektiven aus Wirtschaft, Gesellschaft und Technologie. Ich möchte Denkanstösse geben, Diskussionen anstossen und Organisationen dazu ermutigen, sich mutiger an den Menschen auszurichten, für die sie da sind.

Was mich auszeichnet:

🔹 Klarer Blick für Kundenperspektiven und Serviceerlebnisse

🔹 Leidenschaft für gesellschaftliche Entwicklungen und deren Auswirkungen auf Unternehmen

🔹 Sprachgefühl und Reichweite als Content Creator

Ich freue mich über Austausch, Kooperationen und neue Perspektiven – gerne direkt hier auf LinkedIn.

Cyrill Luchsinger

Wenn Empörung das Nachdenken ersetzt

Die Europäische Union schlechtreden, die eigenen Nachbarländer abwerten und schliesslich auch das eigene Land verächtlich machen: Diese Abfolge ist in der aktuellen politischen Debatte kein Zufall. Das europäische Wirtschafts- und Friedensprojekt zu diskreditieren gehört seit Jahren zu den bevorzugten Strategien der EU-Gegner in der Schweiz. Empörung über alles, was mit Brüssel verbunden wird, ersetzt dabei zunehmend das Nachdenken über tragfähige Lösungen.

Seit Beginn dieses Jahres verschärft sich diese Rhetorik weiter. Die Schweizerische Volkspartei spricht von einer "Verlotterung der Schweiz". Damit richtet sich die Kritik nicht mehr nur gegen Europa oder internationale Institutionen, sondern zunehmend gegen das eigene Land. Wer jedoch das eigene Land pauschal schlechtredet, will es nicht verbessern. Er richtet sich im Narrativ seines Niedergangs ein.

Alles ist kaputt. Alles läuft falsch. Früher war alles besser. Diese Botschaften sind nicht neu. Neu ist, wie konsequent sie von Verantwortung entkoppelt werden. Kritik wird nicht mehr mit der Frage verbunden, wie Probleme gelöst werden können, sondern mit moralischer Abwertung. Empörung wird zum politischen Stilmittel.

Kritik ist notwendig. Eine offene Gesellschaft lebt davon, Missstände zu benennen, Fehlentwicklungen zu korrigieren und Macht zu kontrollieren. Doch pauschale Verachtung schafft keine Lösungen. Sie erzeugt weder Verantwortung noch Fortschritt. Sie erleichtert es vielmehr, sich der Mühe politischer Gestaltung zu entziehen.

Gerade in einem kleinen, stark vernetzten Land wie der Schweiz ist diese Haltung riskant. Wohlstand, Stabilität und politische Handlungsfähigkeit sind nicht vom Himmel gefallen. Sie sind das Ergebnis funktionierender Institutionen, internationaler Kooperation, Reformbereitschaft und der Fähigkeit zum Kompromiss. Diese Errungenschaften kleinzureden, schwächt das Vertrauen in genau jene Grundlagen, auf denen Veränderung überhaupt möglich wird.

Es schliessen sich zwei Dinge nicht aus. Man kann benennen, was nicht funktioniert, und gleichzeitig anerkennen, was gelungen ist. Man kann Reformbedarf sehen, ohne das Land schlechtzureden. Und man kann Europa kritisch begleiten, ohne es pauschal zu delegitimieren.

Politik beginnt dort, wo Empörung endet und Verantwortung übernimmt. Wer ernsthaft verändern will, muss mehr anbieten als Untergangsbilder. Er muss erklären, wie Fortschritt gelingen soll.

Grafik: Symbolbild SVP "Gegen die Verlotterung der Schweiz"

Kunden begeistern. Unternehmen stärken. Gesellschaft gestalten.

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