Career

PhD position in Health Informatics Research Group

Project title: Haptic Augmented VR for Improved Information Capture and Exchange in Medical/Social Environments

Supervisors:

University of Sheffield: Dr. John Fenner (dr. Andrew Narracott – 2^nd supervisor, dr. David Randall – 3^rd supervisor)

Sano: Dr. Arkadiusz Sitek

Project period: Apr 2021 – Mar 2024 (the project will start as soon as the candidate is accepted, and is planned for 4 years)

Degree Awarding Institution: University of Sheffield

This project will provide the methods and technologies for augmenting VR with cheap, adaptable, accessible haptic technology, designed to facilitate natural information exchange. Although VR currently finds application in numerous social contexts (eg. VR conferencing), it suffers from constraints, such as its capacity to isolate the user from traditional office tools such as keyboard, mouse, pen and paper. This project proposes a novel, cheap and effective solution incorporating haptics and  hand tracking, 3D printing etc. As proof of concept, the result will provide a haptic rendition of keyboard/mouse/pen/paper in VR that is seamlessly integrated with the VR environment. This will transform information exchange in a social VR context, by removing isolation from necessary office tools, and open the door to many potential applications.

For this PhD, the effectiveness of this strategy will be evaluated through two environments, namely surgical planning in the clinic, and supervision of in silico medicine R&D. Simple exercises will be assessed with and without the haptically-augmented tools, relying on relevant metrics and questionnaires to judge performance. A successful outcome will promote refinement and urge further acceptance (i.e. translation) within broader medical and technical environments.

This is innovative work and multiple publications and broad application is anticipated. Resolution of issues relating to IP will be a necessary feature of the PhD. 

Extreme-scale Data and Computing team will address the issues presented by the developments of High Performance Computing, AI, big data and cloud computing. As the Centre will push boundaries of current state-of-the-art infrastructures, the ESDC group will satisfy the needs for HPC and cloud computing resource management, AI/big data infrastructures and workloads, distributed programming, workloads, containers, cloud-native applications and federated learning.  

Close integration between research groups at Sano and growing demands created by the development of new tools will require constant evaluation of technologies and platforms, experimenting with approaches and proposing new solutions which will be transformed into novel tools and services. 

Sano invites excellent, experienced scientists, willing to work in an academic startup environment to apply for the Group Leader position. The perfect candidate is a seasoned, independent researcher, with a history of leading a research team, keen to address new challenges and willing to work on technologies of the future in a collaborative environment.

Group Leaders will be key Sano employees, shaping the research strategy of the organization to ensure scientific and commercial success. Collaboration between research Groups will allow the best possible technological solutions to be incubated for clinical and industrial translation.

Personal Health Data Science will work on computational solutions for disease prevention, shifting healthcare philosophy from reactive to proactive and understanding factors affecting human health. The group will develop machine learning methods for analysis and creation of personal health predictive models as well as use or artificial intelligence in public health and epidemiology using vast amounts of data from various sources ranging from wearables, IoT, clinical data to and data from Polish centralized healthcare system.

Ultimate goal would be to create a personal health tracking system, able to collect many types of information and predict existing and future risks, present the user with ways to avoid diseases and provide knowledge on how to improve overall health. From the public health perspective data analytics will be used to understand various factors affecting public health.

Sano invites excellent, experienced scientists, willing to work in an academic startup environment to apply for the Group Leader position. The perfect candidate is a seasoned, independent researcher, with a history of leading a research team, keen to address new challenges and willing to work on technologies of the future in a collaborative environment.

Group Leaders will be key Sano employees, shaping the research strategy of the organization to ensure scientific and commercial success. Collaboration between research Groups will allow the best possible technological solutions to be incubated for clinical and industrial translation.

The Clinical Data Science group will use AI with machine learning and deep learning models to conduct research into improvements in decision making at all stages of patient’s interaction with healthcare system – prevention, diagnosis, risk, optimal path of treatment, and treatment monitoring using the patient-specific data like medical history, lab results, imaging data, personal monitoring data, molecular biology, etc.

Sano invites excellent, experienced scientists, willing to work in an academic startup environment to apply for the Group Leader position. The perfect candidate is a seasoned, independent researcher, with a history of leading a research team, keen to address new challenges and willing to work on technologies of the future in a collaborative environment.

Group Leaders will be key Sano employees, shaping the research strategy of the organization to ensure scientific and commercial success. Collaboration between research Groups will allow the best possible technological solutions to be incubated for clinical and industrial translation.

The Modeling and simulation research group will develop fundamental modeling techniques and workflows, building on established approaches for human physiology modeling, such as projects associated with the Virtual Physiological Human Initiative (www.vph-institute.org).

As a key research pillar of Sano, the Modeling & Simulation research group will target emerging concepts including in silico clinical trials, the interface between mechanistic modeling and machine learning approaches for investigation of complex biological systems and the development of modeling approaches to exploit High Performance Computing infrastructures.  These activities will involve close collaboration with other research groups, particularly Data Science and Health Informatics.

Sano invites excellent, experienced scientists, willing to work in an academic startup environment to apply for the Group Leader position. The perfect candidate is a seasoned, independent researcher, with a history of leading a research team, keen to address new challenges and willing to work on technologies of the future in a collaborative environment.

Group Leaders will be key Sano employees, shaping the research strategy of the organization to ensure scientific and commercial success. Collaboration between research Groups will allow the best possible technological solutions to be incubated for clinical and industrial translation.

Computer Vision Data Science group will focus its efforts on the development of AI technology for automatic analysis and interpretation of visual information in healthcare applications. Applications range from medical imaging, surgery, digital pathology, patient monitoring, etc. The team will develop practical, automated tools to support medical personnel in day-to-day operations. Data science visual-based information will also be combined with other medical information as a part of synergistic decision-making systems. 

Sano invites excellent, experienced scientists, willing to work in an academic startup environment to apply for the Group Leader position. The perfect candidate is a seasoned, independent researcher, with a history of leading a research team, keen to address new challenges and willing to work on technologies of the future in a collaborative environment.

Group Leaders will be key Sano employees, shaping the research strategy of the organization to ensure scientific and commercial success. Collaboration between research Groups will allow the best possible technological solutions to be incubated for clinical and industrial translation.