Education
Internships, Master’s Thesis,
Bachelor & Semester Projects
We offer projects related to (i) the development of new methods in healthcare data; (ii) the derivation of theoretical models, and (iii) the conception and execution of experimental studies for the understanding of SCI secondary conditions. Projects apply advanced machine learning, sensing technology, and robotics towards digital twins in digital health care and rehabilitation. Interested students may check our open student projects or check our research projects and contact the responsible person directly for further questions.
Your own project ideas?
It is always possible to find a project for motivated students with their own ideas in the fields of assistive health care and rehabilitation technologies, advanced machine learning modelling, and applied robotics in health care. Please contact Dr Diego Paez if you would like to pursue a project which is not listed below.
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Currently, the following student projects are available. Please contact the responsible supervisor and apply with your CV and transcripts.
Master Thesis: Development of a Customized Knee Orthosis for Osteoarthritis
Osteoarthritis (OA) presents a significant challenge in healthcare, necessitating innovative solutions to alleviate pain, enhance mobility. This thesis documents the research and development journey of an OA knee orthosis within the Spinal Cord and Artificial Intelligence Lab (SCAI-Lab) at ETH Zurich. This thesis is a close collaboration between the ORTHO-TEAM Group and the SCAI-Lab at ETH Zurich. The collaboration offers a unique exchange of expertise and resources between industry and academia. Together, we aim to make meaningful progress in the field of and empower students to make valuable contributions to their academic pursuits.
Keywords
Osteo Arthritis, Orthosis, Biomechanics, AI, Medical Data, Healthcare
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Master Thesis , ETH Zurich (ETHZ)
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Published since: 2026-06-04 , Earliest start: 2026-08-01 , Latest end: 2027-02-28
Applications limited to ETH Zurich , EPFL - Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne , Empa , University of Basel , University of Berne , Zurich University of Applied Sciences , Università della Svizzera italiana , Hochschulmedizin Zürich , Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts , Institute for Research in Biomedicine , CSEM - Centre Suisse d'Electronique et Microtechnique
Organization Spinal Cord Injury & Artificial Intelligence Lab
Hosts Paez Diego, Dr. , Paez Diego, Dr.
Topics Medical and Health Sciences , Engineering and Technology
Internship (3 months): Synthetic Wearable IMU Data Generation
This internship focuses on developing a pipeline to generate syntehtic IMU data of humans performing primitive motions (e.g. reach, grasp, transport) using OpenSim. It combines purely synthetic data generation, with existing pipelines and open datasets to generate IMU data from visual data.
Keywords
opensim, simulation, biosignals, wearables, real-to-sim
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Internship , ETH Zurich (ETHZ)
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Published since: 2026-06-03 , Earliest start: 2026-09-01 , Latest end: 2027-02-28
Organization Spinal Cord Injury & Artificial Intelligence Lab
Hosts Perez Monica
Topics Medical and Health Sciences , Engineering and Technology
Social VLA for Socially-Aware Robot Navigation in Human-Centered Environments
This project aims to develop a Social Vision-Language-Action framework for robot navigation in crowded and human-centered environments. Unlike conventional navigation methods that mainly optimize collision avoidance and goal reaching, the proposed system will explicitly reason about human social interactions, group formations, pedestrian intent, personal space, and socially acceptable passing or yielding behaviors.
Keywords
Social navigation; Vision-Language-Action models; socially-aware robotics; human-robot interaction; robot navigation; crowd-aware navigation; trajectory generation; social reasoning; robot learning; embodied AI.
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Master Thesis
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Published since: 2026-06-02 , Earliest start: 2026-09-07 , Latest end: 2027-04-30
Organization Spinal Cord Injury & Artificial Intelligence Lab
Hosts Alyassi Rashid , Alyassi Rashid , Alyassi Rashid
Topics Engineering and Technology
Internship (practical or research) in data collection for clinical studies involving spinal cord injury (SCI)
This internship within a clinical setting will bring you close to data collection, data analysis, project and data management while exploring multiple data, 3D gait motion capture and sensor systems. You will experience multimodal clinical data, general clinical practice, and experience in building clinical studies.
Keywords
Motion Capture, Medical and health science, healthcare, Clinical Studies, Spinal Cord Injury
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Internship
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Published since: 2026-05-20 , Earliest start: 2026-06-01 , Latest end: 2027-05-31
Organization Spinal Cord Injury & Artificial Intelligence Lab
Hosts Bill Annika
Topics Medical and Health Sciences
ROS2 Robot Systems and Autonomous Navigation (Student Internship)
Develop the core software and autonomy stack for a new mobile robot platform using ROS2. The project focuses on robot localization, autonomous navigation, system integration, and remote robot operation, with an emphasis on building a reliable and extensible robotics platform for future research and real-world deployment.
Keywords
ROS2, Mobile Robotics, Autonomous Navigation, Localization, SLAM, Path Planning, Robot Systems
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Internship
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Published since: 2026-05-06 , Earliest start: 2026-05-03 , Latest end: 2026-10-31
Applications limited to ETH Zurich , University of Zurich
Organization Spinal Cord Injury & Artificial Intelligence Lab
Hosts Alyassi Rashid , Alyassi Rashid
Topics Engineering and Technology
Constrained Reinforcement Learning for Robot Navigation
This project proposes a Constrained Reinforcement Learning (CRL) framework for social robot navigation that explicitly enforces safety, smoothness, and social-distance constraints. Unlike traditional reward-based RL, the approach integrates multiple constraints and a safety filter to ensure robust and human-compliant navigation across varying crowd conditions.
Keywords
Constrained Reinforcement Learning (CRL) Social Navigation Robot Navigation Safety Constraints Human-Aware Navigation
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Master Thesis
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Published since: 2026-05-05 , Earliest start: 2026-09-01 , Latest end: 2027-04-30
Organization Spinal Cord Injury & Artificial Intelligence Lab
Hosts Alyassi Rashid , Alyassi Rashid , Alyassi Rashid
Topics Engineering and Technology
Learning-based Mapping for Robot crowd-aware Navigation
Learning-based crowd mapping predicts global crowd density and flow from sparse robot observations, enabling crowd-aware global planning beyond local perception. The approach integrates multi-modal priors (e.g., calendars via LLMs) to capture temporal patterns and is validated in simulation and real-world navigation tasks.
Keywords
SLAM Crowd mapping Robot navigation Global planning LLMs Spatio-temporal modeling
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Master Thesis
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Published since: 2026-05-05 , Earliest start: 2026-09-01 , Latest end: 2027-03-31
Organization Spinal Cord Injury & Artificial Intelligence Lab
Hosts Alyassi Rashid , Alyassi Rashid , Alyassi Rashid
Topics Engineering and Technology
Reinforcement Learning for Crowd-Aware Robot Navigation
This project focuses on improving RL-based social navigation by creating a simulation framework with diverse and realistic human behaviors. Current RL methods often train on simplified crowds where all pedestrians behave similarly, which limits generalization in real-world environments.
Keywords
RL, Robot Navigation
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Master Thesis
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Published since: 2026-05-05 , Earliest start: 2026-09-01 , Latest end: 2027-03-31
Applications limited to ETH Zurich
Organization Spinal Cord Injury & Artificial Intelligence Lab
Hosts Alyassi Rashid , Alyassi Rashid , Alyassi Rashid
Topics Engineering and Technology
Internship in data processing of multimodal datasets of clinical studies involving spinal cord injury (SCI)
This internship offers practical experience in processing and analyzing complex healthcare data from multiple sources. You will handle multimodal datasets generated through clinical workflows, and research studies, utilizing data cleaning, integration, classification, and dimensionality reduction methods to uncover meaningful patterns and support clinical decision-making.
Keywords
HR, ECG, BP, wearables, Medical and health science, healthcare
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Internship , Lab Practice
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Published since: 2026-02-24 , Earliest start: 2026-06-14 , Latest end: 2027-06-13
Organization Spinal Cord Injury & Artificial Intelligence Lab
Hosts Paez Diego, Dr.
Topics Medical and Health Sciences