PhD Position Robotic Arm Rehabilitation

Robots can now be found in routine clinical use for the recovery of neurologically injured patients. However, current robots are not delivering the anticipated treatment outcomes, especially in retraining activities of daily living (ADL) such as object manipulation. The limited impact of robot-assisted therapy in ADL might be associated with the lack of meaningful somatic (proprioceptive + tactile) information – e.g., through haptic rendering - during training with robots in virtual environments.

During this PhD, you will augment our exoskeleton for upper-limb rehabilitation with fine haptic capabilities. You will redesign the hand module of our 6DoF exoskeleton’ arm exoskeleton and augment it with cutaneous force feedback displays to provide congruent somatosensory stimulation during assisted training. You will then investigate the influence of somatic feedback on learning to manipulate objects that involve multi-joint movements.

In this project, you will collaborate closely with our clinical partners at Erasmus MC, Rotterdam in the design concept and will evaluate the new technology in patients with brain injuries.

In the Human-Robot Interaction group, we work on neurorehabilitation robotics, cognitive human-robot interaction, and physical Human-Robot Interaction. Strong collaborations exist with cross-faculty institutes (TU Delft Robotics Institute and TU Delft Transport Institute), our national robotic ecosystem (RoboValley, Holland Robotics), Clinical partners (Erasmus MC), and international industry and academia.