2023

We thank all our fantastic collaborators, partners and friends for supporting us in 2023. We wish you relaxing holidays and a happy and most importantly healthy New Year! Your RELab

After suffering a severe case of Covid-​19, Roger Gassert discovered for himself how important a role rehabilitation plays in recovery. The ETH Professor of Rehabilitation Engineering now plans to waste no time ensuring that patients profit from his developments.

Our video presenting the tenoexo, a fully wearable actuated soft exoskeleton for grasping assistance in everyday activities has been viewed over 100k times on our YouTube channel!

At the Nationaler Zukunftstag last Thursday we had the pleasure to welcome six D-HEST-kids at RELab in our lab at GLC. Besides a first glimpse into the potential of technology in rehabilitation, Lena Salzmann showed them how to use neural activity to control a BCI -toy car, and Jessica Gantenbein introduced them to tenoexo and PEXO, our robotic hand orthoses to support grasp function in adults and children. 

Are you interested in exoskeletons and how they can support users in physically demanding tasks, but are not a specialist in the field? Read the new Auxivo White Paper on "How Exoskeletons Provide Support", which introduces the basic working principles on which all exoskeletons build and beautifully illustrates their effect.

Aileen Naef is a postdoctoral researcher working in combination for the RELab and the Lake Lucerne Institute. Her work is part of the StimuLOOP project which aims to investigate how real-​time feedback during therapy sessions can influence the neurorehabilitation of gait quality in stroke and Parkinson’s patients. More specifically, her work investigates whether personalized real-​time visual and haptic feedback can improve gait quality and mobility after stroke.  

Upcoming AI for Good webinar on “Rehabilitation robotics: Advancing physical therapy for improved health outcomes”, in which Olivier Lambercy will be one of the panelists. The event is organized as part of the Robotics for Good programming track, a series of expert talks that explore the applications of intelligent autonomous systems to advance the UNSDGs.

Congratulations to Tim Unger for winning the Best Poster Award at RehabWeek 2023!

On 26 September, Future Health Technologies (FHT) Programme Director Nicole Wenderoth, Olivier Lambercy and Desiree Beck organised a panel discussion on 'Rehab anywhere – how next-generation technologies can bring healthcare to the community'.

FHT researchers are currently demonstrating their latest research at RehabWeek 2023 in Singapore, the top conference in the field of neurorehabilitation technologies, bringing together experts from academia, clinics, and industry! Pass by our booth (A11&12) to meet our team and try our latest technologies for upper limb assessment and therapy, including the new ReHandyBot from Articares.

On the first day of RehabWeek 2023, FHT researchers Hsiao-ju Cheng, Simone Kager, and Olivier Lambercy hosted an exciting workshop on “Bringing Technology-Assisted Upper Limb Neurorehabilitation From Clinic to Home: An Interdisciplinary Perspective".

Dr. Olivier Lambercy, senior scientist and co-director of the Rehabilitation Engineering Lab, has been appointed as Adjunct Professor at ETH Zurich. Olivier’s research is situated at the intersection of medical technology and neuroscience. He is internationally acclaimed for his interdisciplinary research and has registered five patents. He is also Principal Investigator at the Singapore-​ETH Centre, as part of the “Future Health Technologies” programme.

Anna, Johannes, Nadine and Tim from the RELab and the cereneo foundation attended the Upper Limb Summer School in Leuven that brought together a diverse group of attendees.

We had a lot of fun demonstrating the concept of Neurofeedback within the StimuLOOP stand at Scientifica. At our booth, visitors could actively experience personalized rehabilitation methods, offering hands-on insights into the current rehabilitation research in stroke and Parkinson’s disease.

It was a great pleasure to welcome again Prof. Dr. Jumpei Arata from Kyushu University in Japan who visited our lab with his colleagues Nobutaka Mukae and Sanjaya Bandara. We had stimulating presentations and discussions on our hand exoskeleton research projects, and interactive demos of our RELab tenoexo and their SMOVE hand rehabilitation robot.

A pleasure to contribute to the Balgrist Research Day with a booth showing our  tenoexo handexoskeleton and the Skaatec SmartVNS project. A big thank you to the Universitätsklinik Balgrist and Balgrist Campus AG for organizing the event and the delicious BBQ!

Come visit our booth and learn about robotics for healthcare, and also try our ReHandyBot and RELab tenoexo!

We are proud to announce that our research assistant Annina Brunner's publication titled "Effect of a passive shoulder support exoskeleton on fatigue during working with arms over shoulder level" has been awarded the Bronze Best Application Paper Award at the MESROB 2023 conference in Craiova.

We are delighted to welcome the RELab members from Singapore-ETH Centre, as well as our esteemed collaborator, Victoria Peterson from Argentina in Zurich. It was a truly rewarding experience for all of us, as we not only had the opportunity to explore the lab venues in Zurich but also engaged in meaningful interactions and explored each other's projects. Thanks a lot for visiting us!

As part of our research on assistive technology, we have been exploring various options to trigger the motion of our robotic hand orthosis. These different "intention detection strategies" are one of the key tailoring options to enable the adaptation of the device to the individual user’s needs, wishes, and capabilities.