Personal
Research area
I work on technological solutions to support human locomotion in therapy settings and in daily life.
My research at EMC, within my honorary professorship, particularly focuses on wearable balance assistance and on minimalistic solutions to enhance mobility.
This is what I am most proud of
I am most proud of the development of the third prototype of our wearable balance-assisting backpack.
It contains very small and light, yet powerful and high-bandwidth gyroscopic actuators that now make the backpack suddenly much more realistic to be applied in people’s daily lives. We foresee that we will be able to realize a balance-assisting backpack with an overall weight below 5 kg. This is yet unpublished work, but our actuators will be presented at AIM2021 in July 2021.
Milestones for the coming 2 years
In the coming two years, I foresee two main milestones:
- finalizing a therapy-ready wearable balance trainer that can be used with patients in normal therapeutic settings. This device is to be evaluated in an observational study at Shirley Ryan Ability Lab in Chicago, within the COMET grant (see below).
- Launching a “mobility lab” between TUD and EMC/Rijndam that is based on fast-track inventory of individual patient cases that would benefit from new technological solutions, and development of candidate solutions for individual cases. The lab leverages an ecosystem consisting of patients, clinicians, engineers, technicians, researchers, and companies active in rehabilitation technology.
