Bart Verkerke

About Bart Verkerke:

Bart Verkerke is professor in BioMedical Product Development at both the University of Groningen and Twente. He is Director of the Groningen Biomedical Engineering curriculum and the Erasmus Mundus Master’s curriculum CEMACUBE. He is technical scientific director of the Dutch Center of Research Excellence SPRINT, focusing on mobility of elderly.
Research interests are biomechanics and the methodical design of prostheses and orthoses.

ProfouND Role:

INTRODUCTION of SPRINT
In a rapidly ageing society as in the Netherlands, the increasing costs and number of health care workers are no longer affordable and thus a serious effort is necessary to maintain the high standards and the accessibility of health care in the future.
A major problem of our ageing society is associated with impairment of human cognitive capabilities and mobility capacities, people will loose their independent functioning and will require an increasing amount of medical and caring help at home.
Also, older citizens will be increasingly involved in the workforce. However, due to their advancing years older employees may experience physical and cognitive decline.

The Center of Research Excellence SPRINT is founded in 2011 to develop tools that will prevent deterioration, monitoring devices to find older citizens at risk, and intervention tools to restore mobility.

Vision
In our vision, increasing the mobility of patients and older citizens will contribute to maintaining the high standards and the accessibility of health care in the future, with affordable costs and number of health care workers. Increasing the mobility of patients and older citizens will improve their health, enhance their quality of life and enable them to be independent. It will also diminish the need for healthcare professionals, and thereby contribute towards reducing the number of healthcare professionals and concomitant costs. In case they still need medical care, intramural care should be shifted to extramural care as much as possible as an effective and efficient way of reducing the number of healthcare professionals and costs.

In our view, research must be user-driven instead of technology-driven: the needs of the individual patient are essential, not the latest technologies that can be applied. In a user-driven developed device it will adapt to the patient, while in a technology-driven developed device the user has to adapt to the device. Individual, user-driven research will ensure that solutions are usable for the individual user.

ICT will impact the near future of mobility restoration. Distant monitoring will enable regional centers of expertise to obtain a comprehensive picture of the user and provide them and the physician with better and timely report. This will reduce the number of face-to-face meetings between user and physician and the time between exacerbation and treatment.

Serious gaming will offer new possibilities for increasing motivation. Tools like the Nintendo Wii create a new world that can be explored for application in rehabilitation and prevention. Projection of a virtual environment (like is done in computer games) can be used to study the behaviour of patients when subjected to changing or conflicting impressions.
Another possibility is the creation of a virtual environment that will stimulate patients to rehabilitate or elderly to stay fit. Human beings are able to overcome their cognitive processing limitations, resulting in mobility impairments, by utilizing knowledge embedded in the environment of their activity. This embedded knowledge will be used in the virtual environment.

Training and rehabilitation of patients with mobility disorders will be performed to a greater extent in the home environment to shorten the stay in an intramural environment and reduce travel time and costs.

Data obtained from studying the introduction of this new approach will enable us to develop business cases on the level of the individual citizen (improved quality of life, reduced travel cost and time), on the level of the physician and his organization (improved effectiveness of treatment and reduction of time), on the level of companies (less sickness or impairment of employees) and on the national level (reduced intramural stay and involvement of healthcare professionals). Based on hypothetical but realistic cases and occurrence of such cases in the different Dutch regions business cases with respect to the levels mentioned above will be developed for different care arrangements for these cases.

In our vision research should be transferred into the society via the development of products that will contribute to a shift to extramural care, to prevention and to more efficient intramural care. This will increase the position of the Medical Device Industry and will stimulate further research by increased cooperation between industries, universities and health care institutes.

Mission
The overall mission is to:
• prevent older employees from physical or cognitive decline
• prevent older citizens at home from falling by realizing training devices and orthoses to improve balance, physical condition and dual task performance;
• allow rehabilitation at home by realizing training devices or processes;
• restore mobility by realizing second-generation individualized, intelligent mobility devices that are adapted to and interact with the individual patient;
• bring scientific results to the market by multi-disciplinary project teams composed of elderly and patients, scientists, designers, health care professionals, companies and health insurance companies.

Projects will be started to show the feasibility of this strategy by realizing:
• Early warning of employees at risk
• Increased physical and cognitive capacity of older employees
• increased balance capacity, muscle strength and dual-task performance of older citizens at home;
• rehabilitation of patients at home and restoration their mobility;
• tailor-made prostheses and orthoses that restore mobility of patients;
• scientific knowledge-transfer to the industry and preparation of market introduction.

SPRINT PARTNERS
Within SPRINT 5 universities and universities of applied science, 2 coordination centers, 56 companies, 2 health insurance companies and 6 rehabilitation centers are active. Most of them are SME’s, located in the Netherlands, three companies are multinationals. Multidisciplinarity is evident. SPRINT aims to include the entire chain of development, form medical problem definition to market introduction. The participating companies range from serious gaming to machining and from ICT to Quality Control. Numerous scientific departments are included, human movement sciences, rehabilitation medicine, neuro-imaging, etc.

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