Around the world, the population is ageing. In order to cope with the growing demand on our healthcare professionals and make our healthcare system sustainable in the near future, we need safer and more efficient medical instruments, nurses, and caretakers.

 Although current medical instruments and robots are already quite advanced, they often lack the compliance and safety to reach deep inside the body or safely work with patients. Soft robotics could be the solution to this problem. It explores how robots can be built from soft materials to make them inherently safe and adaptive. This makes them extremely suitable to work in unstructured human-inhabited environments and to interact with tissues during surgery.

 A challenging aspect of developing soft robots is that it requires the integration of knowledge from many different disciplines, including material science, engineering science, computer science, biology, zoology, health sciences, and business innovation. This is where the winterschool comes in. We will bring together expertise from all these disciplines and discuss how to apply the knowledge from these different fields in the design of soft robots. This approach will challenge you to think critically, combine knowledge from the different fields, and gain a deeper understanding of health systems. Next to the theoretical knowledge you will obtain during this winterschool, we will organise practical workshops on 3D-printing, casting and origami, company lectures, and tours of our research facilities.  You will also be challenged to build your own soft robot and compete with it against other teams for a prize. Of course, there will be plenty of time for socialising in the evening. In 2 weeks’ time, you will get acquainted with these disciplines and build an interdisciplinary network of peers that will be the driving force behind future healthcare innovation.

For the symposium, several leading experts in the field of soft robotics will be flown in for special keynote lectures and you will get a chance to have a discussion with them. You can also get a chance to discuss your own research if you submit an abstract for the symposium.

If you are as excited as we are about this topic, sign up for the winterschool before the 1^st of December 2021. Only a limited number of spots are available for the winterschool, so do not hesitate to register.

 More information about this winterschool & symposium and how to register can be found at: 

https://www.softroboticswinterschool.nl

We hope to see you there,

Aimée Sakes, Assistant professor, TUDelft, the Netherlands

Rob Scharff, Post Doc, IIT, Italy