SMS News

In 2025, fourteen remarkable individuals from the fields of science, media, business, and culture will come together at the Thomas Mann House in Los Angeles to address issues related to the annual topic “Across Boundaries.”

In recognition of the extraordinary work in the field of Biorobotics Prof. Dr. Robert Riener receives the Key Innovator Award from the IEEE RAS/EMBS International Conference on Biomedical Robotics and Biomechatronics. With this award, Robert Riener is honored as a leading innovator for groundbreaking research, pioneering advancements, and significant contributions to the development of biorobotic systems and technologies.

The Internation Consortium of Rehabilitation Robotics (ICORR) will organize a workshop about “Translating Rehabilitation Robotics into Clinical Applications”. The workshop will take place in the frame of the IEEE Biorobotics Conference in Heidelberg, Germany, on Sept. 1^st, 9:00-13:00. Organizers are Robert Riener, Jon Sensinger, and Meret Branscheidt.

Alexander Breuss has been awarded a BRIDGE Proof of Concept Fellowship. Out of 35 applicants, he was one of seven chosen to receive CHF 130,000 for a 12-month period dedicated to the commercialization of the Somnomat Casa. The Somnomat Casa is an innovative rocking bed designed to enhance sleep quality and address various sleep disorders and was developed in collaboration with his colleague Manuel Fujs.

At the opening ceremony of the ETH Gloria Cube, Chiara Basla from SMS Lab presented the latest version of the MyoSuit for children. Find out more in the video from 1:42.

This year IEEE RAS ICRA started great with one of our papers selected as best paper in the Assistive Systems Workshop icra2024 ROS to Healthcare is our effort to standardize biosignals, biometrics and human model communication in robotics and healthcare from our teams at SCAI Lab , SMS Lab, and SRD Lab from Tohoku University. Congratulation to all the team! Diego Paez, Jose Salazar, Ankit Ravankar, Oriella Gnarra, Jorge Peña Queralta and Alexander Breuss.

Honorable mention for the 2023 IEEE Transactions on Robotics King-Sun Fu Memorial Best Paper Award for paper “ANYexo 2.0: A Fully-Actuated Upper-Limb Exoskeleton for Manipulation and Joint-Oriented Training in all Stages of Rehabilitation” by Yves Dominic Zimmermann, Michael Sommerhalder, Peter Wolf, Robert Riener, and Marco Hutter in IEEE Transactions on Robotics.  

Marie Georgarakis and Yves Zimmermann were honoured with the 2022 Best Paper Award by IEEE Transaction on Medical Robotics and Bionics for their publication entitled “Supporting and Stabilizing the Scapulohumeral Rhythm with a Body- or Robot-Powered Orthosis”. The orthosis described in the paper and also patented assists the scapula on its physiological movement path by coupling the scapulothoracic rotation with the elevation of the arm.

A new ETH study compares 27 humanoid robots with humans and comes to the conclusion that while robots have better components, they are still not capable of achieving as much. However, according to the authors of the study, the machines are catching up.

We are pleased to announce that Oriella Gnarra has received the New Investigator Award at the World Sleep Congress 2023 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. This award was granted to her, besides to 17 other young researchers, out of thousands of applicants.

Clothes have long since ceased to be just fabric over our skin! Muscles to put on can be found at the Sensory Motor Systems Lab. Experience how robotics, smart textiles and fashion complement each other

The young researcher award at the "Robotics and Technologies for Neurorehabilitation" Congress was organized by the Instituto Clinica Quarenghi in San Pellegrino Terme, Italy. The title of the presentation was: "Somnomat Casa – The Smart Bed for Neurorehabilitation". A special thank goes to Doctor Pietro Salvi, Professor Stefano Mazzoleni, Professor Robert Riener, and colleagues Alexander Breuss and Manuel Fujis.

Watch Marcel Hug's race for paralympic gold in this thrilling film produced by Schweizer Paraplegiker-Stiftung. Sensory-Motor Systems Lab was involved in the development of Marcel Hug's wheelchair.

The presentation was titled “Improving sleep through closed-loop autotuning of a robotic bed using Gaussian processes” and was based on a submission together with Zelio Suter, Manuel Fujs, and Robert Riener.

The second CYBATHLON Challenges will take place on 29 March 2023! The CYBATHLON Challenges offer development teams the opportunity to involve people with disabilities in their development process from the very beginning and to test their assistance systems in a competitive situation. The Challenges is of course the build-up on the Road to 2024, the CYBATHLON global edition, which is to take place in October 2024.