Arno Stienen is currently working in the lab of Jules Dewald at the Physical Therapy & Human Movement Sciences department at Northwestern University, Chicago. He uses rehabilitation robotics to investigate the relationship between hyperactive reflexes and the loss of independent joint control in the upper limbs of stroke patients.
In January of 2009, he successfully defended his PhD thesis on Biomechatronic Engineering at the University of Twente, the Netherlands. During his PhD, he explored and created rehabilitation robotics for the upper limb. This resulted in three novel rehabilitation devices: one weigh support system (Freebal, currently sold by Hocoma as the Armeo Boom) and two shoulder and elbow exoskeletons (Dampace and Limpact).
In 2003, he completed his MSc degree in Mechanical Engineering with a specialization in Control Engineering and Mechatronics for Biomedical Engineering at the Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands. In his two master projects, he used artificial, biological-inspired neural networks to simulate information handling in a small layer in the visual cortex (with the research done at the TU-Berlin) and to simulate the spinal reflex network in a neuromusculoskeletal model of the human arm. |
