Unit Digitale Geriatrie, Geriatrisches Zentrum, University Clinic Heidelberg, Germany
My clinical career start was in internal medicine. With the board certification I chose my career path in geriatric medicine and clinical research. The first decade our team worked on epidemiology and intervention trials in orthogeriatrics and fall prevention. The next steps took our team to in-patient and out-patient rehabilitation studies including stroke, PwPD, fragility fractures and post-fall rehab. About 20 years ago we started to use wearable technology to assess, predict and measure outcome parameters. From 2019 until 2024 the core element of the work was the clinical lead of the Mobilise-D consortium to take a deep dive into novel technical and clinical validation of different DMOs in differing patient cohorts. Our most recent activities include work in neurotraumatology (mTBI), elective hip replacement rehab including digital interventions and perturbation studies to improve dynamic balance in frail populations. After 20 years of leading rehabilitation in older persons I am now “only” working in research environment at the University of Heidelberg to mentor PostDocs and PhD candidates to find and accelerate their research careers.