Edoardo D'Anna

Neural engineer
and health scientist

Today, the rapidly evolving field of health sensing technologies offers unprecedented potential for mitigating disease and promoting optimal wellness. Tomorrow, deeper symbiosis between humans and technology will revolutionize the way we monitor, manage, and understand our health.

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About me

Neural engineer (PhD) and Biomedical engineer (MSc)

I am a scientist and engineer with expert level domain knowledge in neural and biomedical engineering. I have a PhD in neural engineering from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL), as well as a Master's degree (MSc) in biomedical engineering, and a Bachelor's degree (BSc) in life sciences and technology.

My areas of expertise are neural engineering, brain-computer interfaces, machine learning, data analysis, health technologies, and clinical studies.

In my spare time, I enjoy spending time outdoors, writing and riding on various planar surfaces designed to glide across matter in both solid and liquid states.



Current Projects

Health sensing at Ōura

I am currently a Senior Signal Processing Engineer at Ōura, maker of the Ōura ring. I am a part of Ōura's Science team, which is responsible for building algorithms, deriving novel biomarkers, and conducting validation studies to provide users with new insights into their health.

Writing

I enjoy writing both fiction and non-fiction, and occasionally publish some of my thoughts, as well as some of my creative writing, on my blog.

Past projects

Non-inasive optical brain imaging at Kernel

I led the team responsible for real-time time algorithms and applications for our non-invasive optical brain imaging device. Kernel aims to target mental health, brain performance and more.

As part of this work, I developed real-time signal processing pipelines, demos and applications for neuroscientific studies.

I wrote about my experience joining Kernel in a blog post.

Sensory feedback for brain-computer interfaces

As a postdoctoral associate at the Rehab Neural Engineering Labs (under the supervision of Prof. Gaunt), I developed novel stimulation strategies to restore richer, more natural sensations of touch, while also improving our understanding of how sensory information is encoded in the brain.

Restoring sensory feedback to amputees

While obtaining my PhD (2014-2018), I studied novel techniques for improving the quality and type of sensory feedback we can deliver to upper-limb amputees. My research was carried out across several clinical sites in Europe and was supported by various European projects, including EPIONE and NEBIAS.

My research focused on three major topics:

  • Using non-invasive electrical stimulation to induce sensations of touch referred to the phantom hand. In a 2017 Scientific Reports article, I showed how this approach could reproduce many of the exciting functional benefits demonstrated with more invasive strategies.
  • Providing multimodal sensory feedback by restoring proprioceptive information in addition to tactile information. I demonstrated that both streams of information were used simultaneously to infer object properties during grasping, such as the size and stiffness of a cylinder. My results were published in Science Robotics.
  • In a Neuron paper, my colleagues and I demonstrated that by using biomimicry to deliver higher-fidelity tactile impulses to the nerves, we could induce artificial touch sensations that felt more natural.

Blink electronics

In 2013, together with four co-founders, I created Blink, a startup bringing biometric sensing to AR and VR. We developed a head-mounted display add-on capable of detecting facial expressions from muscle activity using machine learning. We won a startup prize and associated funding which allowed us to develop custom circuits and sensors optimally suited for this application and file a patent application.

Although the project was discontinued, the domain knowledge, technical expertise and experience I acquired allowed me to join Magic Leap, one of the world's best-funded startups, to work on user sensing and related applications.

Alpine Studios

Alpine Studios was a web development studio I created with Miro Caban in 2015. Here is a selection of some of the most recent websites we created:

  • Swiss scientific journalism association: public-facing website as well as a private social network.
  • Privatim: the Swiss organism for data protection.
  • Contactpointnano: the Swiss resource for nanotechnologies.
  • Snowmaps (no longer online): a homegrown website we developed to keep skiers up to date on the latest slope conditions throughout Switzerland.

Media and Outreach

I have enjoyed sharing my work with people of all backgrounds and ages. I have had the privilege to be invited to numerous outreach events, as well as talk shows and interviews, of which a selection are highlighted here. If you would like me to speak at your event, do not hesitate to contact me at blog@edoardodanna.ch