Three University of Luxembourg researchers picked up prizes at the FNR (National Research Funds) Awards 2013 ceremony that took place on Friday 25 October 2013 at the Luxembourg Chamber of Commerce.

Pascale Engel de Abreu, Associate Professor of Multilingual Cognitive Development received her award in the category “Outstanding Scientific Publications 2013” for her paper entitled “Bilingualism enriches the poor: Enhanced Cognitive Control in Low-income Minority Children”.

Dr Patrice Caire and Dr Grégory Nain, both researchers of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust (SnT), received the “FNR Award for Outstanding Promotion of Science to the Public 2013” for their work entitled “A Convivial, Private and Secure Home Care Assistant”.

Bilingualism could push poorer children ahead of monolingual peers
Pascale’s award-winning article proposed that bilingualism could push poorer children ahead of their monolingual peers of the same socioeconomic status. The results of her study of 80 children of 8 years old (50 % bilingual, 50 % monolingual) demonstrated significant cognitive advantages for the bilingual group in terms of executive function skills.
“These findings have important implications and could help reduce the achievement gap between children of different socioeconomic backgrounds,” says Pascale.

An intelligent home care system (HCS)
As for Caire and Nain, their research looked at how an intelligent system can assist in improving home supervision. The HCS that they have developed allows intelligent networks and other devices to communicate with each other to share information about patients. This means that people in need of medical supervision for whatever reason can keep their independence as much as possible, while still being carefully monitored.

To demonstrate the potential benefits of their work, they created a role play scenario where an elderly heart attack prone lady collapses. She lives in the Hot City zone in Luxembourg and wears an emergency device as an electronic necklace. Thanks to the HCS her circumstances are quickly relayed to a care giver, in this case her neighbour, and she receives rapid assistance.  

“Streamlining the relationship between intelligent devices and networks could transform working and living spaces into intelligent environments,” says Nain.

“For those suffering illness or incapacity, receiving homecare is a convenient and comfortable way to monitor health,” adds Caire.

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Photo, from left to right: Prof. Dr Éric Tschirhart, Dr Grégory Nain, Dr Patrice Caire, Prof. Romain Martin and Pascale Engel de Abreu