1.3 million euros in funding – Medical Valley Award & Lifescience-Medizintechnik
We, the N-squared Lab, in collaboration with FAPS and Noxon GmbH, have won a total of €1.3 million in grants for two innovative projects aimed at helping people with hand paralysis due to stroke or spinal cord injury.
The Medical Valley Award was granted to our team for the project “GraspAgain,” which aims to develop a non-invasive Brain-Machine-Interface to control an orthosis developed by FAPS. The technology will read the movement intentions of individuals with hand paralysis and use those intentions to enable them to grasp again. The project was awarded €500,000, and it will make a significant impact in the neurorehabilitation and neuroprosthetics field.
In addition to the Medical Valley Award, the team won the Lifescience-Medizintechnik grant for their project “NeurOne,” which seeks to develop a neurobandage for the forearm. NeurOne will allow people with hand paralysis to control assistive devices, such as neuroorthoses, using a Brain-Computer-Interface embedded in a sleeve developed by Noxon GmbH. The neurobandage will be printed with high-tech washable and wireless biosensors that record biosignals and transform them into compatible control signals. The NeurOne project received an additional €830,000 in funding.
We are very grateful to be selected as one of the five winning teams among the stronger competition for both projects!
A big thank you, therefore, goes to Medical Valley EMN e. V., Bayern Innovativ and the Bavarian State Ministry of Economic Affairs, Regional Development and Energy.
The winning pitches from Alessandro Del Vecchio (N-squared Lab, “GraspAgain”) and Maria Neugschwender (Noxon GmbH, “NeurOne”) convinced the respective jury with our two projects. Thank you for the great work!
We thank our great medical partners for their full support: Matthias Ponfick, head of the Spinal Cord Center at the Rummelsberg Hospital, and Thomas Kinfe, Head of the Functional Neurosurgery and Stereotaxis Department of Universitätsklinikums Erlangen.
We would also like to thank our N-squared Lab members Dominik Braun, Charlotte Pradel, Marius Oßwald, and Daniela Souza de Oliveira, and additionally, Jonas Walter from FAPS, Marius Neugschwender from Noxon GmbH and Jannik Lockl from inContAlert for their support, which contributed to the success of these projects. We also thank all the N-squared team that contributes to the progress of our research.
The N-squared Lab and our collaborators are committed to advancing the field of neurorehabilitation and neuroprosthetics and look forward to the continued development and application of these groundbreaking technologies.
More information can also be found on our department page: https://www.fau.eu/2023/06/13/news/research/restoring-hand-function-with-intelligent-neuro-orthoses/