Postdoc Markerless Motion Capture for Home Monitoring in Neurological Populations

Are you passionate about shaping the future of healthcare? Do you want to develop technology that truly matters in people’s lives? Join us in creating radical innovations that support patients at home.

The BODIES group at the Department of Biomechanical Engineering, TU Delft, seeks a motivated postdoctoral researcher for a full-time, fully funded, 36-month project on privacy-preserving, single-camera markerless motion capture for clinical assessment and long-term home monitoring of motor impairments in stroke and Parkinson's disease patients. The position is based at TU Delft, with part of the time spent on-site at Model Health in Leuven, Belgium, for the development of the video-based prototype. You will work closely with Model Health and Moveshelf, embedded in the multidisciplinary Care is coming home! program, a 5-year consortium of 2 technical universities (TU Delft, UTwente), 6 hospitals, 13 companies, 1 rehabilitation centre, and 5 patient organisations.

The Challenge

Reliable, long-term monitoring of motor impairments outside the clinic is essential to support home-based rehabilitation, yet existing markerless motion capture systems are rarely validated on neurological gait patterns and struggle to generalize across pathology, body morphology, camera viewpoint, and home environments. This position aims to close that gap: you will develop and validate a novel single-camera markerless motion capture system, combining biomechanical realism, synthetic data generation, and privacy-preserving visualization within a single framework, to enable both clinical assessment and secure, long-term home monitoring.

You will:

• Validate the current markerless motion capture system against marker-based data in stroke patients.
• Generate biomechanically accurate synthetic video data to expand training data and enable controlled sensitivity analyses across pathology severity, body morphology, camera viewpoint, and environmental conditions.
• Develop a single-camera, home-based markerless system.
• Test the algorithm across lab and home-recorded environments to assess real-world performance.
• Design clinician-facing visualization tools ensuring privacy-by-design anonymization of patients and their home environment.

You will translate this into a research plan aimed at peer-reviewed publications, alongside consortium deliverables.

Our offer

You will become part of the funded research program in the Netherlands named Care is coming home!, which involves 9 PhDs and 5 Postdocs. We offer an excellent, inspiring, collaborative, and international research environment, with access to leading experts in medical technology and AI-driven healthcare solutions. Additionally, you will have access to state-of-the-art labs, clinical partners, and patient organisations, creating the conditions to make a meaningful contribution to the future of sustainable healthcare.

• Full-time, 36-month postdoctoral position.
• Excellent mentorship and a stimulating international research environment with excellent facilities.

Job requirements

We are seeking an ambitious, hands-on postdoctoral researcher who is excited to push the boundaries of markerless motion capture and its clinical application. You are eager to combine computer vision, biomechanics, and synthetic data generation to build tools that will shape the future of home-based rehabilitation monitoring.

You bring:

• A PhD in Biomechanical Engineering, Biomedical Engineering, Computer Vision, Robotics, or a related discipline.
• A strong curiosity for human movement analysis and markerless motion capture.
• Experience with pose estimation, computer vision, and/or synthetic data generation for model training.
• Solid programming skills (e.g., Python) for algorithm development, data analysis, and computational modeling.
• Experience with, or affinity for, clinical/experimental gait data from neurological populations (stroke, Parkinson's disease).
• Excellent organizational and communication skills to manage a multi-site project across academic and industry partners.
• Willingness to travel regularly to Model Health in Leuven, Belgium.
• Ability to work independently while thriving in a collaborative, multidisciplinary consortium team.
• Fluency in English, both written and spoken.
• Proficiency in Dutch is a plus for patient communication; proficiency in Moroccan Arabic or Turkish is an additional advantage.

If you enjoy bridging computer vision, biomechanics, and clinical tools, this postdoc is the perfect opportunity to make a real impact in home-based neurological monitoring.

TU Delft

Working at TU Delft means contributing to solutions that really make a difference.

At TU Delft, our people make the difference. With their knowledge and curiosity, our staff provide high-quality education and conduct pioneering research that extends beyond the campus. You will have the opportunity to take initiative, work with others, and grow as a professional in an international community of professionals and students.

Faculty Mechanical Engineering

ME is a dynamic and innovative faculty with high-tech lab facilities and international reach. It is a large and versatile faculty where unique connections are often made by combining different disciplines. This is reflected in its state-of-the-art education and research, and in its contribution to solutions for societal issues, sustainability, prosperity, and well-being.

Conditions of employment

• Duration of contract is 3 years temporary.
• Salary and benefits are in accordance with the Collective Labour Agreement for Dutch Universities.
• An excellent pension scheme via the ABP.
• The possibility to compile an individual employment package every year.
• Discount with health insurers on supplemental packages.
• Flexible working week.
• Every year, 232 leave hours (at 38 hours). You can also sell or buy additional leave hours via the individual choice budget.
• Plenty of opportunities for education, training and courses.
• Partially paid parental leave.
• Attention for working healthy and energetically with the vitality program.