March 2026 was a busy month for the Biomedical Technologies team at IMES — and a particularly memorable one for those of us who found ourselves wearing two hats at once: event organisers and doctoral candidates.
The AERIALIST Network-Wide Event (NWE) brought the full consortium to Hannover for the first time since the kick-off in Brugge. As the host institution, our group at the Institute of Mechatronic Systems (IMES) had been preparing for weeks — coordinating logistics, spaces, and schedules to welcome doctoral candidates and supervisors from across Europe.
The programme included two soft skills sessions, one on voice and presentation presence coaching, and one on team dynamics and collaboration — the kind of training that does not always make it into a conference recap, but proves genuinely useful for early-stage researchers still finding their footing. Beyond the sessions themselves, having the whole network together in one place was the real highlight: strengthening connections across institutions and working towards something larger than any individual project.
Running in parallel was the AutoMed and MedRob Symposium 2026, a conference dedicated to automation in medicine and robotics for healthcare. For many of us in the AERIALIST network, this sits squarely at the heart of our research — and for me, it also marked a personal milestone: presenting my first paper at an international conference. The paper, Cross-Dataset Evaluation of Sit-to-Stand Movement Classifiers for Post-Stroke Rehabilitation, was part of Technical Session on Signal Analysis & Machine Learning, and addresses one of the persistent challenges in rehabilitation robotics — building movement assessment tools that generalise across datasets and patient populations, rather than overfitting to the conditions of a single study. Taking that work from a written manuscript to a live presentation in front of domain experts is a different experience altogether. A good kind of different.
Presentation session at AUTOMED+MEDROB
Presentation session at AUTOMED+MEDROB
What made AUTOMED stand out, beyond the technical content, was its community. The conference brought together early-career researchers working on overlapping problems, from signal processing to clinical robotics and machine learning for healthcare, and the conversations that happen in the margins of those events are often where the most interesting ideas surface. Even the late evenings spent with the team setting up, rearranging, and putting the venue back in order after sessions became, unexpectedly, a fond memory to look back onto: there is something about shared effort at the end of a long day that no formal programme can replicate.
Organising and attending events simultaneously is demanding, but it offers a kind of immersion that is hard to replicate otherwise. Hannover was a chance to connect, contribute, and take a concrete step forward in disseminating our work. We look forward to seeing where the next network event takes us.
Connect with us
AERIALIST Doctoral Network: https://dn-aerialist.eu
Institute of Mechatronic Systems, Leibniz University Hannover: https://www.imes.uni-hannover.de
AutoMed & MedRob Symposium: https://www.automed.science/