Webinar – Robotics for child health

Luc de Witte is a professor of Technology for Healthcare at The Hague University of Applied Sciences in the Netherlands. Earlier he worked as a professor at the University of Sheffield in the UK, and at Maastricht University and Zuyd University of Applied Sciences in the Netherlands. Luc trained as a medical doctor but has always worked on practice-oriented research in the field of rehabilitation and long-term care, including elderly care, care for people with mental or physical disabilities, care for people with chronic diseases and child healthcare. He is currently president of the Global Alliance of Assistive Technology Organisations (GAATO). His research focuses on assistive technology for persons with functional limitations as well as the application of technology to improve healthcare.

Dana D. Damian is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in the Department of Automatic Control and System Engineering at the University of Sheffield. She received her PhD from the University of Zurich in 2012. She was a visiting scholar at Johns Hopkins University, Stanford University, and Carnegie Mellon University (2011/2013). She was a postdoctoral research fellow at Boston Children’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School before joining University of Sheffield. She leads the Sheffield Biomedical Robotics Laboratory where her group’s mission is to develop bionic and implantable devices that show life-like behaviour and sustain operation for long-term therapies, and are minimally invasive, in order to advance surgical treatments and regenerative medicine. Her research has been supported by EPSRC, UKRI, MRC and SNSF.

Huub van Hedel, Ph.D., PT, is Prof. for Neurorehabilitation, head of research, and member of the executive board of Swiss Children’s Rehab of the University Children’s Hospital Zurich, Switzerland. He was trained as a physiotherapist (Bachelor in 1995) and biomedical health scientist (MSc in 1998) in the Netherlands. Then, he moved to Switzerland to work in adult neurorehabilitation. He received his Ph.D. in 2004 and switched in 2010 to pediatric neurorehabilitation. He was appointed Adj. Professor by the University of Zurich in 2016 and Honorary Professor by the Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh, in 2018. His research interests cover pediatric neurorehabilitation, outcome assessments, motor learning, and rehabilitation technologies. Huub and his team won multiple awards during the past years. He holds several teaching appointments, authored over 100 publications, acquired over CHF 14M in funding, and is an editorial board member of Neurorehabilitation and Neural Repair.