Junior Researcher Smart & Personalized AI Coaching for Home Rehabilitation

Would you like to conduct research as a Junior Researcher Smart & Personalized AI Coaching for Home Rehabilitation to contribute to a more active and healthy society for all? Then take a look at this vacancy.

Your function

The project

Acquired brain injury (ABI), including stroke, imposes a growing burden on Dutch healthcare. Every year thousands of patients face long-term limitations demanding rehabilitation and secondary prevention. Meanwhile, rehabilitation professionals face rising demand and staff shortages. Traditional rehabilitation programmes rely on in-clinic supervision, while current home-based training options are unstructured and poorly monitored. This leaves patients uncertain about exercise intensity and progress, therapists without timely information, and informal caregivers with limited support—undermining safety, efficiency, and outcomes.

TrAIn@home aims to design, integrate, and validate an AI-driven coaching platform for real-time, personalized, and safety-bounded home rehabilitation in adults with ABI. Multimodal data from wearables, context, and patient-reported outcomes are translated into actionable insights using AI-tools. Built-in safety rules and professional oversight ensure reliability and acceptance. Rather than replacing therapists, the platform strengthens and supports their role by providing structured information while giving patients guidance for safe, effective exercise at home.

By reducing unnecessary clinic visits, shortening waiting lists, and enabling more efficient allocation of therapist time, the TrAIn@home platform eases pressure on healthcare while lowering treatment costs. At the same time, it strengthens patient recovery through timely, personalized, and explainable feedback that enhances safety, motivation, and autonomy in home rehabilitation. Finally, TrAIn@home delivers validated multimodal datasets and integrates explainable, safety-bounded AI into clinical workflows. This advances understanding of dose–response relations and movement quality in ABI rehabilitation, while establishing transferable methods and infrastructures for other chronic conditions. TrAIn@home thus provides a foundation for sustained innovation in evidence-based, AI-assisted rehabilitation.

The targeted starting date is 1 April 2026.

Your duties

• Lead Work Packages 2 and 3 within the TrAIn@home project and coordinate project management and collaboration with partners (AUMC, HvA, SMEs).
• Design and develop study protocols and develop/evaluate AI algorithms (e.g., intensity, adherence) for home-based rehabilitation.
• Analyze movement data, validate findings in lab and living-lab studies, and conduct reliability, validity, and therapist–AI agreement analyses.
• Work with wearables, integrate movement data into usable models, and ensure secure data sharing under FAIR and GDPR principles.
• Recruit patients via rehabilitation centers and report findings through scientific publications, conferences, and structured meetings.
• Collaborate with interdisciplinary partners on ethics, implementation, and stakeholder engagement.

Your profile

As a researcher, you will contribute to the development, validation and evaluation of AI-driven algorithms for monitoring training intensity and adherence in home-based rehabilitation for individuals with acquired brain injury. You will work with wearable-derived physiological and movement data and translate these data into clinically meaningful and methodologically sound computational models. Your research will focus on assessing system reliability, validity and therapist–AI agreement using established statistical methods and reference measures. Studies will be conducted in controlled and living-lab research settings that simulate real-world rehabilitation contexts while remaining outside routine care pathways. You will evaluate system performance, usability and acceptability, and contribute to iterative model refinement and implementation-oriented insights. The AI model will be tested in shadow mode and under supervised, research-only use, in close collaboration with clinicians and under ethical approval.

Keywords: rehabilitation; physiotherapy; artificial intelligence; home-based care; health technology

Requirements

• Bachelor and (Research) Master in Human Movement Sciences, Psychology, (Bio)medical Science, Health Science, Computer Science, AI, Physics, or a related area.
• You have a technical background, with experience in analyzing data/wearables and developing algorithms (R, Python, Git, reproducible workflows).
• You like project management and you are good at coordinating the work with different project partners (AUMC/HvA/SME).
• You like to organize things, and communicate and interact with stakeholders (e.g., steering group).
• You have experience in developing and conducting study protocols, preferably in a clinical setting.
• You have excellent communication skills. You are fluent in English and (preferably) Dutch, both verbally and in writing.
• Experience with validation of digital health interventions would be welcome.

What do we offer?

A challenging position in a socially engaged organisation. At VU Amsterdam, you contribute to education, research and service for a better world. And that is valuable. So in return for your efforts, we offer you:

• a salary of minimum € 3.546,00 (Scale 10) and maximum € 5.538,00 (Scale 10) gross per month, on a full-time basis. This is based on UFO profile Researcher 4. The exact salary depends on your education and experience.
• a position for at least 0.7 FTE. Your employment contract will initially last 1 year. Afterwards, the possibility of expansion exists.

We also offer you attractive fringe benefits and regulations. Some examples:

• A full-time 38-hour working week comes with a holiday leave entitlement of 232 hours per year. If you choose to work 40 hours, you have 96 extra holiday leave hours on an annual basis. For part-timers, this is calculated pro rata.
• 8% holiday allowance and 8.3% end-of-year bonus
• contribution to commuting expenses
• optional model for designing a personalized benefits package
• group insured for partial disability with employer contribution of 50% of the premium

About the team

Faculty of Behavioural and Movement Sciences

The Faculty of Behavioural and Movement Sciences focuses on the broad domain of behaviour and health. Working at Behavioural and Movement Sciences means working in an ambitious organization that is characterized by an informal atmosphere and short lines of communication. Our faculty offers tremendous scope for personal development.

Department of Human Movement Sciences

The department of Human Movement Sciences conducts research on sport and exercise, the human musculoskeletal system, on the way people move, and on how human movement can be influenced in the context of sports, health, physical education and rehabilitation. Our research is multi-disciplinary: we combine anatomy, physiology, psychology and biomechanics to understand and enhance human movement and physical activity.

The department provides a vibrant climate with high quality teaching and research staff and PhD-students who are supported by excellent facilities (e.g., multiple labs for experimental research, equipment for movement analysis and physiological measurements, as well as high-quality engineering support to develop custom-made equipment and set-ups).