CRC EmpkinS

Collaborative Research Centre

“EmpkinS” is a Collaborative Research Centre (CRC) funded by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG). We are in the first funding period (duration: July 2021 – June 2025). The full title of EmpkinS is:

„Empatho-Kinaesthetic Sensor Technology – Sensor Techniques and Data Analysis Methods for Empatho-Kinaesthetic Modeling and Condition monitoring”

The twelve-year research program of the CRC 1483 aims to open up completely new „digital“ and patient-centered diagnosis and therapeutic options in medicine and psychology.

The focus of EmpkinS is on capturing human motion parameters remotely in a minimally disturbing and non-invasive manner and with very high resolution. The physiological and behavioural states underlying the motion pattern are then reconstructed algorithmically from this data, using biomechanical, neuromotor, and psychomotor body function models. The sensors, body function models, and the inversion of mechanisms of action establish a link between the internal biomedical body layers and the outer biomedical technology layers. Research into this link is highly innovative and extraordinarily complex, and many of its facets have not been investigated so far.

To address the numerous and multifaceted research challenges, the EmpkinS CRC is designed as an interdisciplinary research program. The lead university of the CRC is Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg. Scientists from Technische Universität Hamburg, Technische Universität München and Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits are involved as well. In the EmpkinS team, more than 85 engineers, doctors, psychologists and theologians do research from different disciplines. The CRC 1483 is one of the most interdisciplinary Collaborative Research Centres in Germany.

The enormous future and innovation potential of the EmpkinS approach is based on the prospect of recording multiple body (dys)functions simultaneously with easily accessible and widely available sensor technology that is neither invasive nor stressful. EmpkinS enables the currently available, usually complex, and cost-intensive diagnostic medical technology, which is mostly used as point-of-care technology and doctor-centered, to be expanded with innovative, patient-centered, sensory and diagnostic options.