2019

The assessments with our award-winning Virtual Peg Insertion Test indicate an exciting 2020! Wishing you happy holidays and a good start into the new year.

Jan Dittli, Jan Lieber and Fabian Rast receive the Anna Müller Grocholski-Award, conferred at this year's symposium of the Swiss Academy of Childhood Disability.

Christoph Kanzler was among the Best Student Paper Award Finalists of the IEEE International Conference on Rehabilitation Robotics (ICORR) in Toronto 2019. The awarded work focused on assessing the functional usage of upper limb myoelectrically-controlled hand prostheses using the Virtual Peg Insertion Test (VPIT), a technology-aided assessment previously developed at the RELab.

The abstract submission for the CYBATHLON Symposium 2020 is now open. Join us in Zurich on April 29, three days before the CYBATHLON competition, to showcase and discuss the latest developments in the user-driven design and the evaluation of assistive technology!

ETH researchers are planning to partner with clinics, foundations, public authorities and other institutions through a broad- based initiative aimed at improving the quality of life and participation of people with physical disabilities. The initiative focuses on a centre that will be a nexus of ETH expertise with up to eight new professorships and a new Master’s programme.

Congratulations! Alumni Mike Domenik Rinderknecht and hack4life team won the first prize in the medical technology challenge of the healthhackathon19 at the XPOMET 2019 in Berlin.

Last weekend, Jan Dittli and Jessica Gantenbein got the possibility to demo our robotic hand exoskeleton tenoexo at the NCCR Robotics Pavilion as part of the EPFL (École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne) open days in Lausanne.

Welcome to Giada Devittori who joined us for a PhD. Giada Devittori started her Ph.D. studies in Health Sciences and Technology in August 2019, at the Rehabilitation Engineering Laboratory (RELab, ETH Zurich).Her research focuses on developing and testing a strategy for minimally supervised therapy with a robot for hand rehabilitation.  

Worth reading article (in German) about robotics in health care. Includes interviews with Roger Gassert and Tobias Bützer.

It will still be a long way before brain-computer interfaces are able to read thoughts. And many limitations need to be considered, according to Roger Gassert.

On the recommendation of ETH President Joël Mesot, the ETH Board appointed 13 ETH professors during its meeting on 10 and 11 July 2019. Roger Gassert, currently Associate Professor at ETH Zurich, was promoted to Full Professor of Rehabilitation Engineering.

Excellence Scholar Paula Wulkop studies Robotics and explains what motivates her most about her projects and the Excellence Scholarship & Opportunity Programme. It was great to have you in the lab, Paula – all the best for your future!  And a big thank you to all the donors who support our excellent students!

Rehab Week 2019 is coming to an end. Thank you for all fantastic talks, inspiring conversations and insightful workshops!

Welcome to Jessica Gantenbein who joined us for a PhD. Her main research interest lies on the investigation of different modalities for intention detection of assistive technologies and their functional benefits. In the long-term, she aims to contribute to bridging the gap between technical developments and daily-life applications in this area.

Team VariLeg enhanced had a successful shooting day for our Rollout video in Rapperswil. Thomas could walk, stand up and sit down without further assistance and the weather was perfect for filming. 

Whether building an exoskeleton for paraplegics or an autonomous construction robot, the Focus projects are a chance for mechanical engineering students to solve a complex technical challenge.    

Minister Heng Swee Keat, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Finance of Singapore and his delegation visited ETH Zurich and tried out tenoexo, our robotic hand exoskeleton!

In exactly one year, on 2-3 May 2020, the SWISS Arena in Kloten, near Zurich, will host the CYBATHLON for the second time. This event takes the latest robotic assistive technologies for people with physical disabilities and puts them to the test. Teams from all continents are already intensively preparing to master new and more difficult tasks.

We are designing a user-centered development framework for wearable robotic assistive technologies, based on user experience research, intensified stakeholder involvement and a toolbox for the selection of standardized measures that consider the context of usage.

Welcome to Jan Jan Dittli who joined us for his Phd. His main research interests include wearable robotics, assistive technologies for rehabilitation as well as daily living, motor control and neurorehabilitation.