2025/11/24 | People | Rehabilitation & Neural Engineering

PhD Defense: Lena Bruhin Evolves Long-Term Patient Care through Sensor-Based Monitoring System

On November 24, 2025, Lena Bruhin successfully defended her PhD thesis: "Solutions for Healthcare Challenges in Aging Populations: Leveraging Sensor-Based Monitoring to Extract Activity Patterns."

In this thesis, Lena addressed the challenges our overburdened healthcare system is facing due to the demographic shift towards older age and the increase in multimorbidity. Traditional clinical practice relies heavily on episodic in-person assessments that capture only brief snapshots of patient health, which fail to detect natural day-to-day variability in health status.

Throughout her project, Lena developed and evaluated a multimodal sensor-based measurement system, that would collect continuous digital measures and extract clinically relevant digital biomarkers describing physiological, movement, and behavioral parameters. The system demonstrated robust technical performance across over 420 days with low error rates and efficient thoughput and was supplemented with a comprehensive ethical framework ensuring privacy, autonomy and beneficence for patients.

The sensor recording software was first evaluated in a pilot study on healthy patients and then deployed and evaluated in real-world clinical settings with three vulnerable patient populations—(i) people with Parkinson's disease monitored at home, (ii) older adults in long-term care facilities, and (iii) patients in geriatric psychiatry wards—adapting the system to ensure accurate results in each environment.

This unobtrusive multimodal sensing system provides continuous insights into patient health without requiring user interaction or compliance and enables the capture of naturalistic movement and behavior, overcoming limitations of traditional episodic assessments. It bridges the gap between clinical assessments and daily life monitoring, while respecting patient privacy and autonomy.

Algorithm and corresponding results from Bruhin et al. (2024), see publications below. ©Lena Bruhin

Congratulations to Dr. Lena Bruhin on this incredible achievement and contributing to making sensor-based monitoring systems ready for practical healthcare deployment!

Publications:

Bruhin, Lena C.; Single, Michael; Naef, Aileen C.; Petermann, Katrin; Sousa, Mario; Castelli, Matilde; Debove, Ines; Maradan-Gachet, Marie E.; Magalhães, Andreia D.; Diamantaras, Andreas A.; Lachenmayer, M. Lenard; Tinkhauser, Gerd; Waskönig, Julia; el Achkar, Christopher M.; Lemkaddem, Alia; Lemay, Mathieu; Krack, Paul; Nef, Tobias; Amstutz, Deborah (2025). Changes in sensor recorded activity patterns and neuropsychiatric symptoms after deep brain stimulation for Parkinson’s disease: 5 case reports. BMC Neurology 25(1):25. BioMed Central 10.1186/s12883.025-04030-w

Single, Michael; Bruhin, Lena C.; Naef, Aileen C.; Krack, Paul; Nef, Tobias; Gerber, Stephan M. (2024). Unobtrusive measurement of gait parameters using seismographs: An observational study. Scientific Reports 2024 14(1):14487. Springer Nature 10.1038/s41598-024-64508-4

Bruhin, Lena C.; Single, Michael; Naef, Aileen C.; Colombo, Aaron; Möri, Kevin, Gerber, Stephan M.; Lahr, Jacob; Krack, Paul; Klöppel, Stefan; Müri, René M.; Mosimann, Urs P.; Nef, Tobias (2024). A Transferable Lidar-Based Method to Conduct Contactless Assessments of Gait Parameters in Diverse Home-like Environments. Sensors 24(4):1172. MPDI 10.3390/s24041172

Single, Michael; Bruhin, Lena C.; Schütz, Narayan; Naef, Aileen C.; Hegi, Heinz; Reuse, Pascal; Schindler, Kaspar A.; Krack, Paul; Wiest, Roland; Chan, Andrew; Nef, Tobias; Gerber, Stephan M. (2023). Development of an Open-source and Lightweight Sensor Recording Software System for Conducting Biomedical Research: Technical Report. JMIR Formative Research 7:e43092. JMIR Publications 10.2196/43092