While running the Post-Doctoral project BETER REHAB, I submitted a proposal for a Young Teams Grant (Tinere Echipe in Romanian), launched by UEFISCDI. This type of grants are for all levels of research with the purpose of increasing the human resources on research in Romania. The idea of my proposal was to develop further the BETER REHAB system, changing the objective of rehabilitation from following intention to maximizing muscle production.
The rationale behind this proposal was to find trajectories that optimize the involvement of specific muscles. This is useful because rehabilitation can be more successfull if it focuses on the muscles affected (e.g. after trauma). It can also be used to relieve from load specific areas of the body, e.g. after a surgery.
There were 898 proposals in total from the whole country, out of which 212 projects were accepted for financing. And TRUE REHAB (the name of the new project) was among the once accepted!
Targeted Robotic UppEr-arm REHABibilitation (TRUE REHAB) started on the 1st of September, and it involves myself as Principal Investigator, Ș.l. dr. ing. Alexandru Codrean as responsible for the control of the robot, and dra. ing. Ioana Anamaria Ulici as responsible for the practical implementation and the final validation study. I am honoured to work with so dedicated and skilled colleagues and I am sure that we’ll manage to complete all the project objectives and more than this.
We have already started working on the first aspects of the project (dissemination plan, a block diagram describing the components of the project and their interaction, setting up of the robotic manipulator), and are preparing for the first year report of the project.
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