PhD Lower-limb prostheses: optimal human-in-the-loop co-adaptation (1.0 FTE)

This 4 years PhD position is a joint appointment between the research group of Prof. Raffaella Carloni (Robotics Lab, Dept. Artificial Intelligence, Faculty of Science and Engineering, University of Groningen) and the research group of Prof. Han Houdijk (Department Human Movement Sciences - Section Rehabilitation, University Medical Center Groningen).

The PhD position is funded by HTRIC (Health Technology Research and Innovation Cluster) and it is framed within the research project CoAdapt. Given the great challenge of providing people with lower limb amputation with an artificial limb that can mimic the behavior of its biological counterpart, the CoAdapt project aims at developing a human-in-the-loop approach in which the user and the (control settings and mechanical parameters of the) prosthesis co-adapt to each other in an optimization process.

The successful applicant will work on a multidisciplinary project aimed at developing novel control architectures towards the optimal co-adaptation between people with transfemoral amputations and their prostheses.
Particularly, the successful applicant will:

• define gait performance metrics and gait analysis procedures
• design and implement (optimal) control architectures for a transfemoral prosthesis that account for the human-in-the-loop
• prepare clinical evaluation protocols
• perform pre-clinical and clinical tests in close collaboration with people with transfemoral amputation.

The PhD candidate will receive excellent training through cutting-edge research projects, advanced courses and training opportunities, complemented by workshops on generic research, transferable skills, and teaching. The PhD candidate should be committed to conduct independent and original scientific research, to report on this research in international publications and presentations, and to present the results of the research in a PhD dissertation, to be completed within 4 years. The PhD candidate is expected to contribute 10% of their overall workload to teaching.