NRC welcomes Biomedical Engineering Professor Rui Loureiro as Research Director
Plans for rehabilitation research at the NRC are set to take another leap forward following the appointment of the NRC’s Research Director.
Professor Rui Loureiro, Head of the Department of Orthopaedics and Musculoskeletal Science at University College London, has been selected to be the new NRC Research Director and will set the research agenda for the NHS-led centre.
Through his extensive research career, Professor Loureiro has pioneered the use of technology in healthcare, particularly through robotics and virtual reality within rehabilitation for stroke patients and movement disorders, with amputees and for pain management, and also for training surgeons and planning of complex surgical procedures.
In addition, he has grown the Aspire Centre for Rehabilitation Engineering and Assistive Technology (Aspire CREATe) at UCL from three academics to a multidisciplinary team of 56 people, and served in several committees and contributed to the development of new cross-faculty initiatives such as the establishment of the WEISS centre, UCL Institute of Healthcare Engineering, and UCL Robotics Institute.
Professor Loureiro explained that his research experience, combined with his passion for bringing research into a clinical setting to benefit patients at the point of care, meant that the NRC Research Director role was an obvious fit.
He said: “Being part of the NRC is the right thing to do. For me, this is the opportunity to join all the dots and bring all the pieces of the rehabilitation research puzzle together to change the lives of our future patients.
“The UK has so much promise in this area – we have a huge talent pool in science and healthcare across the nation, but we need to get better at bringing them together, and the NRC will enable us to do that at a national level.
“It’s exciting to be part of breaking the boundaries by having engineers and researchers working alongside clinicians, all for the good of the patient.”
Throughout his experience, Professor Loureiro has seen first-hand how powerful having researchers and engineers embedded in a clinical space can be.
Examples of this have included developing tools with clinical colleagues to deliver focussed vibrations to a joint or muscle in patients with an incomplete spinal cord injury, to alleviate the symptoms of spasticity and the associated pain. This approach enables the patient to participate more fully in the work with their Occupational Therapist (OT) as their joints are more relaxed – all as a result of OTs sharing their rehab challenges and working with Professor L’s research team.
Another example was a patient with complex regional pain syndrome who had previously benefitted from rehabilitation therapy utilising Virtual Reality to alleviate pain, who needed a bionic hand but would need to wait over three years and it would cost the NHS £50,000. By working with the patient, clinicians, engineers and researchers were able to 3D print a bionic hand, fit it with electronics and connect it to Virtual Reality, all within three weeks and for less than £4,000, enabling the patient to self-manage their condition and become pain-free.
Professor Loureiro explained that this interdisciplinary team approach to rehabilitation solutions is how he hopes research will take place at the NRC.
He said: “In rehabilitation, we need to move away from the traditional clinical research which takes 10, 15, 20 years to complete before it is implemented and benefiting patients, as each rehab patient journey is different – a more holistic approach is needed to fast track the development and delivery of effective rehabilitation innovations.
“We need to bring everyone together to develop interventions at pace that might not yet exist for our patients and then translate the research to develop further those interventions to benefit even more patients across the country.
“In five to 10 years, I expect this to be the UK model for delivering rehabilitation, and I hope we will see it delivered and deployed across the nation as part of a hub and spokes model.”
Miriam Duffy, NRC Director, said: “We are delighted to welcome Professor Loureiro to the NRC team and know that his wealth of experience in rehabilitation will be of great benefit to our patients, researchers and staff.
“We look forward to seeing how we can best work together to transform rehabilitation research in the UK.”
Professor Loureiro originally studied electronics and computing, advanced robotics and cybernetics to PhD level and arrived in the UK from his home country of Portugal 29 years ago.
In 2004, the Professor won the Britain’s Young Engineer Award for a product inspired in the most unlikely way – by the olive oil his grandmother used to make. His winning design was a magnetorheological fluid – a fluid which turns into a solid when exposed to a magnet – this powered an intelligent wrist orthosis as small as a mobile phone for cancelling out tremors in patients with Parkinson’s and essential tremor.
Professor Loureiro’s research career began at the University of Salford where he built a haptic simulator for laparoscopic surgery and later at the University of Reading, he worked on the first robot in Europe for stroke rehabilitation, which helped patients to practice upper-limb movements by turning it into a computer game. This was rolled out to people with strokes, traumatic brain injuries, tremor suppression and recently in neuropathic pain.
He said: “The driver for us to create this technology was so that patients could live a dignified life and be able to do simple things that we often take for granted, such as drinking a cup of tea or coffee, or brushing your teeth.
“When you see the sparkle in the patient’s eyes when they are using the technology, there are no words that can describe that feeling. None of us in healthcare are in it for the money, but seeing how our efforts have such an impact on people’s lives, is priceless.”
Professor Loureiro moved to the University College London, where he expanded his studying of VR and haptics in rehabilitation and also developed training simulations for surgeons. To date, these have included spinal endoscopic procedures, epidurals, hip replacements, foot and ankle arthroscopies, and bowel and bladder procedures. A feasibility study has recently been completed to create training for obstetricians on delivering babies through manual rotations.
Other projects Professor Loureiro has worked on include a project (funded through the Ministry of Defence, Wellcome Trust, RNOH Trust) to develop a system using virtual reality to help patients with neuropathic or ‘phantom limb’ pain. The innovation has recently been awarded the IET Emerging Technology Award 2023.
The treatment works by providing an upper-limb amputee with VR glasses, which gives a first-person view of having a working hand or limb again. A robot is then connected to the patient’s residual limb so that when they are interacting with the environment within virtual reality, the robot provides the weight of the object seen in their hand or provides the pressure sensation to mimic the friction when pushing an object across a table and any collisions with other objects.
This tricks the brain into thinking the limb is returned, which stops the pain loop the brain has become caught in.
He said: “The hope is to use this technology in future at the NRC. A recent feasibility study saw substantial reduction of pain in all patients with some reaching a point where they did not have any pain, and for some patients whose limb was still intact but they no longer had any motor control or sensations, they recovered some feeling and use of the limbs and therefore were not amputated. This has tremendous implications for some of the patients coming to the NRC.”
In August, Professor Loureiro will be travelling to India with his team to trial a low-cost version of their VR system with amputees, a collaboration with colleagues at AIIMS in Dheli.
Professor Loureiro is a passionate public speaker with a variety of outreach activities, including through mainstream media (e.g. Channel 4, ITV, BBC), runs a PPI group on spinal and nerve injuries, and he champions equality, diversity and inclusion in STEAM subjects through the delivery of workshops at schools, open days and by mentoring and supporting young individuals from minority backgrounds. He was the founding president of the International Consortium on Rehabilitation Robotics - ICORR (the biggest association in his field).
Professor Loureiro lives in Reading with his wife and family, and enjoys practicing Karate and playing computer games with his son, gardening and cycling.