Mogelijk werken sommige onderdelen van onze website niet naar behoren. Voor een optimale beleving bekijkt u onze website het beste in Chrome of Firefox.
Just before most of us will enjoy summer holidays we are pleased to sent you another ICMS newsletter to keep you informed about all the progress we are making together.
We are looking back on a successful Mid Summer Event on June 29, 2022. Is was great to finally meet each other in real live at the TechMed Centre in Enschede. Together we worked on identifying the crossroads where Clinical, Research and Technical pathways meet: on the patient journey!
These journeys are considered to be kick-starters for the foundation of the ICMS R&D agenda for the following years. Taskforces will be set-up to further elaborate on this.
Almost 100 participants from hospitals, educational institutions, care and network organizations from Gelderland and Overijssel put their heads together on 21 June to answer the question: How do we ensure that residents of the east of the Netherlands stay fit and healthy for longer? Our Research Leads Jaap Buurke and Noël Keijsers hosted one of the parallel sessions about applications for movement monitoring.
Marcel Karperien will perform research on diagnostics and treatment on arthrosis. In the Netherlands, more than 1.5 million people suffer from arthritis. As arthritis is a condition that mainly occurs among older people, the number of patients is set to increase due to the ageing of Dutch society. At present, there is no adequate treatment for arthritis. The OAinject programme will develop new diagnostic tools that will determine which form of arthritis a person has so that individualised treatments can be offered. The researchers will also work on innovative ways of gradually administering drugs locally over a longer period of time via an injectable drug depot in the joint. With this approach, the consortium will ensure that patients can retain an active lifestyle that helps to prevent other conditions such as cardiovascular disease and dementia.
Maroeska Rovers, currently one of the two (founding) directors of Health Innovation Netherlands and scientific director of the expertise centre Medical Innovation & Technology (MITec) at Radboudumc, will be the new scientific director of the TechMed Centre of the University of Twente from September 1, 2022.
Maroeska has extensive experience with clinical scientific collaborations and accelerating the adoption of health technology innovations. Since she is enthusiastic about the multidisciplinary approach, we are looking forward to cooperate together.
In recent months, the arm-hand robot 'ArmeoPower' has been successfully tested in the Roessingh Innovation Lab.
After the test and evaluation period, Roessingh was the first rehabilitation center to purchase the ArmeoPower. The physiotherapists and occupational therapists involved are enthusiastic and expect added value in the treatment of various patient groups, including people who have had a stroke.
Hy2Care® is a ‘spin-off company’ of the TechMed Centre of the University of Twente. The company receives financing via the European Innovation Council (EIC) Accelerator program. The EIC Accelerator is a highly competitive program of the European Commission offering funding, coaching and business acceleration services to innovative small or medium-sized businesses with a scalable proposition and global potential. In this latest call of the program, only 7% of all applications received funding.
Prof. dr. Marcel Karperien, Research Lead within ICMS and his Developmental BioEngineering group at the University of Twente (Netherlands) invented the Hy2Care hydrogel technology with the aim to facilitate regeneration of damaged cartilage. Hy2Care recently started its First in Human clinical trial at the University Medical Center Utrecht. This financing enables Hy2Care to complete its clinical studies and to obtain European market approval with its game-changing hydrogel for optimal cartilage repair.
Control your limbs with your brain. For most people the most normal thing in the world. Not for spinal cord injury patients. An international consortium of four parties, including the Sint Maartenskliniek and ONWARD, wants to change this with the research project 'Brain-Spine Interfaces to Reverse Upper- and Lower-limb Paralysis'. To carry out this research, the consortium received a grant of 3.6 million euros from the European Innovation Council (EIC).
In the consortium, the Sint Maartenskliniek is working together with ONWARD Medical N.V. (leader of the project), École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and CEA-Leti Clinatec. With this grant, the collaborating partners want to merge two important technologies into a Brain-Spine Interface (BSI) system for people with spinal cord injuries. It involves a combination of targeted, programmed stimulation of the spinal cord and an implant that measures and decodes brain signals. This allows people with spinal cord injuries to 'turn on' spinal cord stimulation with their brain, instead of with a button. This means that they will actually move if they intend to move.
eHealth – in or out of our daily lives?
While there are many different eHealth services (being) developed, its use among the target population is still low. Marian Hurmuz aimed within her PhD to increase our understanding about the (non-)use of eHealth services among the target population in a real-world setting. After a bit more than 3 years, she finalised her PhD thesis and, on June 16, 2022, she had her PhD defence.
It takes two: The synergistic role of patients and healthcare providers in reducing drug-related problems
On July 1, 2022, Victor Huiskes successfully defended his dissertation entitled "It takes two. The synergistic role of patients and healthcare providers in reducing drug-related problems".
He recommends that more attention is needed for effective and equal communication between patients and healthcare providers about drug-related problems, whereby the patient ensures that problems are reported more often and healthcare providers provide space for this and address the patient-reported problems.
Bart van den Bemt member of the executive board and Clinical Research lead of ICMS was one of the promotors and Research Lead Els van den Ende, co-promotor.
Integrated spasticity assessment and treatment using disentangled joint impedance
On May 25, 2022 Ronald van 't Veld defended his PhD thesis on the need for objective and reliable quantification of spasticity to enable a correct diagnosis and treatment plan.
In his thesis he develops and evaluates an integrated spasticity assessment and treatment in an experimental environment with stationary posture.
His results showed the neurophysiological validity of the parallel-cascade (PC) system identification technique to assess intrinsic and reflexive joint resistance contributes through the agreement with the neurophysiological basis on which the PC algorithms are built. In clinical practice, 1-2 min measurements of time-invariant segments provided sufficient data for the PC technique to disentangle the intrinsic and reflexive contributions. Towards spasticity assessment and treatment, a reliable longitudinal quantification of spasticity and a cost-effective non-invasive spasticity treatment remain an open challenge. In absence of a golden standard, concurrent development and assessment of fundamentally different spasticity assessment methodologies is essential in future studies to eventually obtain a valid, responsive and reliable spasticity diagnosis approach.
Research Lead Herman van der Kooij was the promotor of Ronald.
The University of Twente has received the definite green light to add the new Master's programme Robotics to its education portfolio as of the academic year 2022-2023. A visitation took place recently by the NVAO, the accreditation body of the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science (OCW). The outcome was positive and the final hurdle has been taken.
The Robotics Master’s brings together several UT disciplines and the programme has three specialisation tracks:
• Mechatronics and physical AI
• Algorithms and software AI
• Human-robot interaction and social AI
Robotics students at UT can choose from a variety of cutting-edge projects such as exoskeletons and robotic platforms for surgical catheters and use the Surgical Robotics labs (precision medical robots) and the Robotics and Mechatronics lab.
Reed more: https://www.utwente.nl/en/robo...