Cyrill Bätscher

Cyrill Baetscher is CEO of Advanced Osteotomy Tools (AOT) and is responsible for Marketing & Sales and Business Development.

Cyrill Baetscher holds an MBA from the State University of New York at Albany (USA) and a BBA from the Graduate School for Business Administration in Zurich (CH). In addition, he holds a degree in mechanical engineering from the FHNW Muttenz (CH). Cyrill Bätscher has extensive expertise in management positions at MedTech companies (Stratec Medical, Synthes, Johnson & Johnson) as well as in industry (Ringele AG, DoetschGrether AG).

Associate Prof. Christos Bergeles

Christos Bergeles received the Ph.D. degree in Robotics from ETH Zurich, Switzerland, in 2011. He was a postdoctoral research fellow at Boston Children’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts, and the Hamlyn Centre for Robotic Surgery, Imperial College, United Kingdom. He is now a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) the School of Biomedical Engineering and Imaging Sciences of King's College London, leading the Robotics and Vision in Medicine Lab. Dr. Bergeles received the Fight for Sight Award in 2014, and the ERC Starting Grant in 2016. His main research area is image-guided micro-surgical robotics.

Prof. Hannes Bleuler

Dr. Mohamed Bouri

Dr. Mohamed Bouri is with Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL, Switzerland). He is the head of Rehabilitation and Assistive Robotics group since 2005 and lecturer of Robotics and Industrial Robotics. He graduated in Electrical Engineering in 1992 and obtained his PhD degree in 1997 in Industrial Automation at INSA LYON, France. Since 1997, he is at EPFL and is mainly active in the field of robotic rehabilitation for lower limbs. Dr Bouri has strong references with the development of many rehabilitation robotic devices and exoskeletons (LegoPress, TWIICE, Autonomyo, HiBSO, Handreha,…) and of industrial robotic applications.

Jean-Marc Collet

Jean-Marc Collet, BU Manager, Division Marketing Manager / Robotics, Stäubli AG

With 25-year experience in robotics and industrial automation Jean-Marc Collet is global manager of Stäubli AG, Swiss Business Unit of the Stäubli group.
For many years now, Stäubli Robotics has been on a mission to develop robots for life science applications, also meeting all the constraints of patient care.

Easy to clean, with minimal particle emissions and high precision, they relieve doctors of some of the strain they are under while performing operations that demand their full concentration

Dr. Elena De Momi

Elena De Momi, MSc in Biomedical Engineering in 2002, PhD in Bioengineering in 2006, currently Associate Professor in the Electronic Information and Bioengineering Department (DEIB) of Politecnico di Milano. She is co-founder of the Neuroengineering and Medical Robotics Laboratory, in 2008, being responsible of the Medical Robotics section. IEEE Senior Member, she is currently Associate Editor of the Journal of Medical Robotics Research, of the International Journal of Advanced Robotic Systems, Frontiers in Robotics and AI and Medical & Biological Engineering & Computing. From 2016 she has been an Associated Editor of IEEE ICRA, IROS and BioRob, Area Chair of MICCAI and she is currently Publication Co-Chair of ICRA 2019. She is responsible for the lab course in Medical Robotics and of the course on Clinical Technology Assessment of the MSc degree in Biom. Eng. at Politecnico di Milano and she serves in the board committee of the PhD course in Bioengineering.
Her academic interests include computer vision and image-processing, artificial intelligence, augmented reality and simulators, teleoperation, haptics, medical robotics, human robot interaction. She participated to several EU funded projects in the field of Surgical Robotics (ROBOCAST, ACTIVE and EuRoSurge, where she was PI for partner POLIMI). She is currently PI for POLIMI of the EDEN2020 project, aimed at developing a neurosurgery drug delivery system and of the ATLAS MSCA-ITN-2018-EJD, and coordinator of the MSCA-IF-2017 – Individual Fellowships. She has been evaluator and reviewer for the European Commission in FP6, FP7 and H2020.

Dr. iur. Lukas Engelberger

Dr. iur. Lukas Engelberger is state council of the Canton Basel-City and head of the Canton’s Department of Health.

Roger Gassert

Roger Gassert is Professor of Rehabilitation Engineering at the Department of Health Sciences and Technology at ETH Zurich. Born in 1976 in Solothurn, Switzerland, he received the M.Sc. degree in microengineering and the Ph.D. degree in neuroscience robotics from the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland in 2002 and 2006, respectively. During his Ph.D., partially carried out at the ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories in Kyoto, Japan, he developed an MRI-​compatible robot technology that lead to the first haptic interfaces allowing safe and gentle interaction with human motion during functional MRI. These systems are now being used to investigate sensorimotor control and learning with partners in Japan, the UK and Switzerland.

He subsequently participated in the development and clinical evaluation of pioneering robotic rehabilitation systems to train hand function after stroke as postdoctoral fellow at Imperial College London and Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation. From December 2007 to November 2008 he headed the joint robotics lab between EPFL and the University of Tokyo at the Robotic Systems Lab at EPFL. He joined ETH Zurich in 2008 as as Assistant Professor, and was promoted to Associate/Full Professor in 2014/2019.

Roger Gassert is vice president of the strategic board of the CYBATHLON, member of the foundation boards of Access for all, the cereneo center for interdisciplinary research in telerehabilitation, as well as member of the scientific advisory board of the Innovation Centre for Assistive Technologies of the Swiss Paraplegic Foundation

Dr. Lukas Jaeger

Dr. Lukas Jaeger is the Head of Competition & Partnerships at CYBATHLON. The CYBATHLON is a platform to advance research and development in the field of assistive technology suitable for everyday use. At the same time, CYBATHLON aims to promote the dialogue with the public on the topic of inclusion and equality of people with disabilities.

From 2003 to 2009 Dr. Lukas Jaeger studied human movement sciences at ETH Zurich, and he is also a certified sports instructor and coach. From 2011 to 2015 he conducted his PhD studies on the neural correlates of lower limb motor control. After graduating he held different roles in the pharmaceutical industry before joining the CYBATHLON project team in June 2017.

Thierry Keller

Thierry Keller received his Dipl. Ing. degree in electrical engineering (M.Sc.E.E.) and his Doctorate (Dr. sc. Techn.) from the ETH Zurich, Switzerland in 1995 and 2001, respectively.
Currently, Dr. Keller is the head of the Neurorehabilitation Department at Tecnalia, the largest private research center in Spain. Main activities of the Neurorehabilitation Department are research & innovation of novel enabling technologies for rehabilitation robotics, tele-rehabilitation, technologies for physical and cognitive prevention, and FES technologies including neuroprostheses.
Dr. Keller is principal investigator in national and international projects and chaired the EU COST action TD1006: European Network on Robotics for Neurorehabilitation. He developed various neuroprostheses that help improve walking and grasp functions in spinal cord injured and stroke subjects. His research interests are in the fields of rehabilitation engineering and robotics, neural prostheses, signal processing and human-machine interaction.
Since 2015, Dr. Keller chairs the umbrella society International Consortium for Rehabilitation Technologies (ICRT), which associates IISART, IFESS, ICORR and ICVR societies with the aim to organize joint conferences under the brand Rehabweek. Dr. Keller is executive board member of the International Functional Electrical Stimulation Society (IFESS), and the International Industry Society in Advanced Rehabilitation Technologies (IISART). From 2014-2019 he served as president of the IFESS.

Prof. M. Husty

Prof. Lorenzo Masia

Lorenzo Masia graduated in Mechanical Engineering at “Sapienza” University of Rome in 2003 and in 2007 He accomplished his PhD in “Mechanical Measurement for Engineering” at the University of Padua.
He started his path in robotics spending two years at the Mechanical Engineering Dept. of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) (from Jan- 2005 to Dec 2006) working at the Newman Lab for Biomechanics and Human Rehabilitation.
He was then postdoctoral researcher at the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT) in the Robotics Brain and Cognitive Sciences Department and He started his academic path as Assistant Professor at the School of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering (MAE) at Nanyang Technological University (NTU) of Singapore (2013-2018). He was Associate Professor in Biodesign at the Department of Biomechanical Engineering of the University of Twente (The Netherlands) from June 2018 to March 2019. Now, since April 2019, He is Full Professor in Medical Technology at Heidelberg University (Germany) at the Institute of Computer Engineering or Institut für Technische Informatik (ZITI),  leading the ARIES Lab (Assistive Robotics and Interactive ExoSuits). 
Prof Masia was awarded multiple times in the leading conferences in Biorobotics and Robotic Rehabilitation winning two IEEE Best Student Paper Awards (IEEE ICORR2015 and IEEE Biorob2016), one IEEE Best Paper Award (IEEE ICORR2011), and finalists of "Best Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) Paper Award" at IEEE ICRA 2017.
He has been appointed three times Program Chair for the IEEE International Conference in Rehabilitation Robotics (ICORR) 2015, IEEE Biorobotics and Biomechatronic Conference (BIOROB) 2016 and International Conference on Neurorehabilitation (ICNR 2018).
He served as Chairman for Workshop/Tutorial for the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (IEEE ICRA 2017), and He was the Co-Program Chair of IEEE ICORR 2017 (London, UK), and Co-Program Chair, Editor in Chief and Editor of Publication for IEEE Biorob 2018.

Jan T. Meyer

Jan T. Meyer, MSc, is a PhD candidate at the Rehabilitation Engineering Laboratory, in the Department of Health Sciences and Technology at ETH Zurich. His research focuses on the development and application of user-​centred design approaches for robotic assistive technologies. He is particularly interested in improving the usability evaluation and target population involvement during the development of devices for people with sensorimotor deficits. Over the course of the last five years, Jan has been involved in the development and testing of numerous wearable robots for assistance and augmentation at ETH Zurich, Harvard University, and the ETH Zurich Spinoff Auxivo.

Prof. Doina Pisla

Professor Doina PISLA is currently the Director of Council for University Doctoral Studies within the University of Cluj-Napoca, Romania and the Director of the Research Center for Robots Simulation and Testing - CESTER within the same university.

Professor Doina PISLA obtained her PhD within the Technical University of Cluj-Napoca in 1997.

Following an academic carrier, she became full professor at the Department of Mechanical Systems Engineering in 2005, teaching lectures in Parallel Robots and Medical Robotics.

Prof. Pisla’s research activity is focused mainly on the field of Robotics and Mechatronics, with emphasis on the Kinematics and Dynamics of parallel robots, Development of innovative medical robots, Reconfigurable structures. As a result of her scientific activity, prof. Pisla published over 180 peer-reviewed full papers in scientific journals and conferences, co-authored over 10 patents. She has been director or key member of more than 50 international and national projects.

She founded and organized the first MESROB Workshop in Cluj-Napoca, Romania in 2012 and she initiated the new Springer Book Serie “New Trends in Medical and Service Robots” in 2014.

She served in boards and program committees of various international conferences and congresses, being currently member of the Technical Committee for Computational Kinematics and for Biomechanical Engineering of International Federation for the Promotion of Mechanism and Machine Science (IFToMM).

Prof. Dr. Georg Rauter

Georg Rauter is Assistant Professor for Medical Robotics and Mechatronics at the Bio-Inspired Robots for MEDicine-Lab (BIROMED-Lab) at the Department of Biomedical Engineering of the University of Basel. As head of the BIROMED-Lab, he leads one of the four research groups of the Department’s flagship project on Minimally Invasive Robot-Assisted Computer-guided LaserosteotomE (MIRACLE Project).

Georg Rauter received his Ph.D. at the ETH Zurich in the field of robot-assisted multimodal human motor learning and has a background in Mechatronics in Mechanical Engineering (Dipl.-Ing.at TU Graz) and Mathematical and Mechanical Modeling (Ing. Dipl. at the Université Bordeaux).

Georg Rauter is General Chair of the Medical Robotics Week 2021, as well as of the 7th international Workshop on New Trends in Medical and Service Robotics, Basel (MESROB2021).

Prof. Russell H. Taylor

Russell H. Taylor received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford in 1976. He joined IBM Research in 1976, where he developed the AML robot language and managed the Automation Technology Department and (later) the Computer-Assisted Surgery Group before moving in 1995 to Johns Hopkins, where he is the John C. Malone Professor of Computer Science with joint appointments in Mechanical Engineering, Radiology, and Surgery and is also Director of the (graduated) Engineering Research Center for Computer-Integrated Surgical Systems and Technology (CISST ERC) and of the Laboratory for Computational Sensing and Robotics (LCSR). He is the author of over 450 peer-reviewed publications and 83 patents, a Fellow of the IEEE, of the AIMBE, of the MICCAI Society, of the National Academy of Inventors and of the Engineering School of the University of Tokyo. He is also a recipient of numerous awards, including the Maurice Müller Award for Excellence in Computer-Assisted Orthopaedic Surgery the IEEE Robotics Pioneer Award, the MICCAI Society Enduring Impact Award, the IEEE EMBS Technical Field Award, and the Honda Prize.

Prof. Alfred Vogel

Alfred Vogel is Senior Professor at the Institute of Biomedical Optics (BMO), University of Luebeck, Germany, and Deputy CEO of the Medical Laser Center Luebeck GmbH. From 2010 – 2019 he served as Director of the BMO. He received the Ph.D. degree in Physics from University Goettingen in 1987, and the degree of Habilitated Doctor of Physics from the University of Luebeck, Germany, in 1999. Since 2010 he is also Adjunct Professor of Xi’an Jiaotong University, PR China.

Dr. Vogel is fellow of the Optical Society (OSA) and of SPIE. He published 89 peer-reviewed papers, 6 book chapters, and 51 proceedings papers (12 450 citations, h = 47 according to Google Scholar; or 7350 citations, h = 36 according to ISI Web of Knowledge), and reviewed for 60 international journals and 32 institutions. He holds 15 patents and has filed another 7 patent applications. He has delivered 180 plenary, key note, and invited talks.

Dr. Vogel was editorial board member for the Journal of Biomedical Optics from 2002-2019, served as associate editor of Optics Express from 2006-2009, and is advisory editor of Biomedical Optics Express since its launching in 2010.

Dr. Vogel has made major experimental and theoretical contributions to the field of pulsed laser interactions with molecules, cells and biological tissues. He developed comprehensive theoretical frameworks for pulsed laser tissue interactions ranging from photochemical changes to ablation, and for controlled nonlinear energy deposition in transparent dielectrics. He invented new technologies for imaging and characterization of plasmas, shock waves, cavitation bubbles, and ablation plume dynamics. His research encompasses surface ablation through linear absorption of ultraviolet and infrared laser pulses, ablation processes in a liquid environment such as in blood vessels or joints, as well as plasma-mediated ablation, surgery, and molecular modifications within nominally transparent materials such as ocular tissues and cells. His work in these areas has led to innovative strategies for improving cellular micro/nano surgery, intraocular surgery, and refractive surgery.

Prof. Stefan Weber

Stefan Weber received a degree in Electrical Engineering and Automation from the University of Ilmenau (Germany) in 1998. He then joined the Robotics Lab of the University of Southern California USC as a Fulbright Fellow. He graduated with a PhD in Augmented Reality applications in medicine from the Humboldt-University in Berlin (Germany) in 2004. From 2005 to 2008 he worked as a young scientist at the Technische Universität München. From 2008 to 2012 he was assistant professor for Computer Assisted Surgery and Implantation Technology at the University of Bern. In 2012, he became full professor for Image-Guided Therapy and director of the ARTORG Center for Biomedical Engineering at the University of Bern. His research interests include fundamental and translational aspects of image guided surgery, surgical robotics and medical image analysis.

Stefan Weber is a member of the Cantonal Ethics Board.

Prof. Hans-Florian Zeilhofer

Hans-Florian Zeilhofer has various entrepreneurial experiences and is currently involved in several MedTech start-up companies. He is a professor and since 2002 Head of the Department for Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery at the University Hospital in Basel. His research includes the use of computer-assisted 3D-methods in the surgery of the facial skull. Additionally, he is a Chief Physician at the Kantonsspital Aarau as well as Head of the Hightech Research Center of Cranio-Maxillofacial Surgery, which was established by him and has been birthplace of several successful start-up companies. Hans-Florian Zeilhofer finished his doctorates and habilitation at TU Munich.

CYBATHLON Team VariLeg enhanced (SUI)

Team Bio – VariLeg enhanced (SUI), ETH Zürich and OST University of Applied Sciences Eastern Switzerland

 Speaker: Silvia Rohner

VariLeg enhanced is more than a walking device for paraplegics. "Our goal is to transfer technology from a pure racing exoskeleton into a novel, user-centric development", explains Silvia Rohner who leads the project. This program has initially been launched by ETH and OST after CYBATHLON 2016. 15 students from different fields were devoting two semesters to develop an exoskeleton in close cooperation with the two pilots. This prototype was further optimized by a team of engineers and health scientists. With a lot of training, both pilots were able to control their exoskeleton such that they mastered the whole obstacle course without failure in CYBATHLON 2020. The focus now shifted towards a more generic mobility aid, which will eventually support as many paraplegics as possible in their rehabilitation process and their everyday life.

YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJvuTvci6oaSpwofyyc-ECA

Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/VariLegenhanced/

Instagram:

https://www.instagram.com/varileg_enhanced/?fbclid=IwAR3N2BE5fs1XvMYs4ayFfS_kJtWIxdsPpH9KOntEf1ialLlZMFT1vCiOnfE

CYBATHLON Team SoftHand Pro (ITA)

Team – SoftHand Pro (ITA), Instituto Italiano di Tecnologia

 Speaker: Manuel G. Catalano, Manuel Barbarossa, Maria R. Fossati

The active prosthesis SoftHand Pro is very soft and light, which makes it comfortable to wear. The different drives are connected by tendons, which create fluid movements and allow a flexible and adaptable grip.

SoftHand has been developed since 2012 by the team carrying the same name at the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia and the Centro E. Piaggio of the University of Pisa. The team saw the potential for SoftHand to make a significant contribution to an underserved population and began the development of the prosthetic version of the robotic hand: the SoftHand Pro (EU funded project SoftPro). Their goal at the time was to develop a prosthesis that was robust, reliable and easy to control. recalls team manager Cristina Piazza. "As the prototype became more widely known, we received an increasing number of inquiries from people with amputations who wanted to use the hand.” As a next step, the researchers plan to integrate an active wrist to increase the versatility and possibilities of use. Moreover, the team is know involved in a European project that aims to integrate in the hand haptic feedbacks (Natural BionicS).

Website:

www.softhandpro.net 

Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/softhandpro/ 

Instagram:

https://twitter.com/SofthandP