Report on Ph.D. Summer School

Neurorehabilitation of movement for Humans with central nervous system injury or disease

1-5 July 2002, Kotor, Yugoslavia

The course entailed lectures from distinguished members of the FES community, combining electrical and mechanical engineers, physiotherapists and others; from clinical, industrial and educational sectors. Each day there was a morning lecture and an afternoon lecture, with a substantial lunch break between. Due to the location, participants could relax and sport during the lunch break, which enabled the afternoon session to be equally as enjoyable as the morning.

Lectures included:

Pathologies of the CNS (Prof. V. Kostic), tools to measure changes in the sensory-motor systems with emphasis on spasticity (Prof. T. Sinkjaer), robots for neurorehabilitation, rehabilitation of standing and walking (Prof. T. Bajd), FES of upper extremities (Prof. D. Popovic), clinical requirements for effective neurorehabilitation, methods to activate atrophied and denervated sensory motor systems, methods for assessing impairments and disability (Prof. J. Burridge), techniques to assess cortical reorganisation.

The scientific importance of the course for you as a young researcher:

The course was very important scientifically. The invited speakers were present for most of the duration of the course, therefore giving students the chance ask questions and allowing PhD students like myself to gather information that could not be found in literature. As everyone stayed more or less in the same place, it permitted a lot of conversation, which inevitably led to exchange of information regarding studies and thereby a flow of information was created. As students knew each other's backgrounds, information could be exchanged, based on recent difficulties and solutions.

The social importance for a young researcher in the network with a view to networking/collaboration:

While at the course, the members of NeuralPRO had already been relatively familiar with each other, and there was always time to share studies as with the other members of the course. Ideas were passed, also about exchanging information with each other regularly and continuously keeping a close network. The course also provided the opportunity to exchange e-mails with others, so that in the future, information exchange can continue, which should enable the future of research to be quite efficient.

Overall impression and recommendations:

Overall, the course was excellent; lectures were interesting and useful, as was communication with others, in the same field of work. The relaxed atmosphere and the location was highly praised as well as the social program, which kept everyone together and yet still permitted relaxing times during breaks etc. My recommendation would be to continue this course, perhaps in the future, those who attended this course could go to another, with different content, and newer participants (and/or PhD students) could attend a course more or less the same content as this course. To improve the course, I would suggest that hard copies of lectures were made available at the location.