The ARTORG Center for Biomedical Engineering Research is the University of Bern's transdisciplinary Center of Excellence for medical technology research. Its mission is to tackle unmet clinical needs and envision future challenges in diagnosis, monitoring and treatment to create viable healthcare technology solutions with imagination, agility and purpose. Its projects run from discovery and basic research to clinical translation.
Gerontechnology is the study of technology and aging to ensure good health, social participation, and independent living. The relevance and importance of this field increases with the aging of our society. Within the Gerontechnology and Rehabilitation Group (GER), clinicians, psychologists and engineers collaborate with the goal to develop and evaluate technologies that promote independent living for elderly patients with mental illness or neurodegenerative disorders.
Aphasia is an impairment of the language functionality that typically follows a brain damage (stroke). This can affect various modalities of the language (reading, speaking, understanding, writing). Therapy is typically conducted by Speech and Language therapists through face-to-face meetings with the patient during which they work on the affected language modality through paper-pencil exercises. Recent findings have highlighted the positive effects of higher frequency training at little dose, and one possible approach is to make use of tablet-based applications to complement the therapy. The GER group has developed such a telerehabilitation solution for aphasic patients, allowing patients to solve exercises that have been assigned by therapists in-between the normal face-to-face meetings.In this context, the GER group is looking for someone to help in the validation of some German exercises of the telerehabilitation solution. Therapists typically select exercises from a pool of exercises called the Exercise Catalogue. The catalogue regroups exercises of different types, which are structured based on some linguistic properties. The task here consists of validating these pre-existing exercises to make sure they fully implement the selected linguistic properties and fix any remaining mistake. The validation is done through a web application and can be performed remotely.For this position, we are looking for a candidate with the following skills / education: