Student project: Advancing conversational interface for digital twins in health

Enhancing and extending the existing conversational interface for health digital twins to improve user interaction and actionable insights.

What you will do

Managing one’s health or a chronic disease in daily life can be a challenge due to burdensome, intrusive and/or infrequent health monitoring. At OnePlanet, we are therefore developing new sensing techniques to continuously and non-obtrusively collect health data. Insights from these multimodal data would allow for timely lifestyle recommendations to maintain or improve health. We derive these insights using our Health Digital Twins, virtual representations of certain physiological, biological or behavioral processes that we can model or simulate in-silico.

Large language models (LLMs) can bridge the gap between complex health data and the understanding of insights by patients, caregivers, and healthcare providers, by translating insights into accessible and personalized explanations, recommendations, and alerts. This interface enhances usability, allowing end-users to interact intuitively with their digital twins, understand actionable health insights, and make informed decisions.

In this internship, you will focus on updating, enhancing and maturing the existing conversational interface with our existing data, algorithms and models in the Digital Twin R&D program. This may include, but is not limited to: 

• Conducting a comprehensive literature review on the subject.
• Integrating additional data sources or refining the mapping of sensor data and algorithm outputs to ontology standards.
• Extending the current functionalities of the interface to support new use cases or data types.
• Assessing and implementing strategies to ensure data security and privacy within the interface.
• Improving robustness, scalability, or user experience of the interface.
• Iteratively testing and evaluating enhancements in collaboration with mentors.
• Working in an agile setting to deliver timely, effective results.

The internship work and activities will be organized with a scrum-like methodology: you will maintain the backlog in coordination with your mentors. You will select prioritized tasks from the backlog, and you will tackle and evaluate them on a biweekly basis. At the end of each biweekly iteration, you will showcase the progress made and will reflect on insights and improvements to focus on. Additional stakeholders may take part in the showcases to get better feedback on the study.

What we do for you

• We have a diverse team of experts both from the technical and biomedical sides to supervise and support you.
• We have a challenging problem where you have freedom to help develop it into a specific direction.
• You will join the Digital Twin team of OnePlanet, which employs state-of-the-art knowledge on machine learning for precision medicine.
• You will be able to exchange views and knowledge with the OnePlanet and Imec community of experts and scientists, widening your professional network.
• At OnePlanet we embrace diversity and thus give equal opportunities to intern candidates with diverse backgrounds.

Who you are

• MSc student in AI, Data Science, Informatics, and/or Engineering equivalent.
• Affinity with AI research and healthcare.
• Familiarity with AI techniques, particularly with large language models.
• Organized and communicative.
• Basic understanding of agile/scrum.
• Python skills for prototyping.
• Plus – experience working with personalized healthcare data.
• Plus – experience working with medical ontologies.

Interested

Does this position sound like an interesting next step in your career at imec? Don’t hesitate to submit your application by clicking on ‘APPLY NOW’.
Should you have more questions about the job, you can contact jobs@imec.nl.