Engineering and Empathy
From an early age, John harbored aspirations of becoming a star football player. Though he still plays football as a defender in a regional league, his professional journey took a different path. After high school, he started pursuing his true passion – helping people. While studying biomedical engineering at Technical University Graz, he collaborated with friends to design and build an experimental ramp for Special Olympics athletes. This device enabled those most impacted by a disability to participate in the sport of bowling.
Motivated by this experience, John enrolled in Neural Prosthetics and Neural Engineering at a university in the Netherlands to pursue his advanced degree . In his master’s thesis, in cooperation with the hospital in Utrecht, he facilitated communication for ALS patients, who were in advanced stages of this dreadful illness and had lost all the means of expressing themselves. By thinking of a finger tap and looking at a display, they were able to digitally type out their thoughts . This greatly improved their wellbeing.
Groundbreaking Research
John keeps following his passion of aiding people to this day. His doctoral research focuses on devising an application for the detection of cerebral palsy in children. For an illness that progressively lowers mobility, early care can dramatically improve quality of life, making this an incredibly important contribution. Collaborating with a Viennese hospital specializing in cerebral palsy, John captures patient movement through 3D video recordings during examinations. A machine learning model then analyzes their gait and alerts of any symptomatic patterns. In comparison with the usual process, many more children can be examined and get the care they need, when using John’s system.
At Cloudflight, John uses his deep technical expertise to support customers on their digitalization journey. As a backend developer, he connected IoT sensors with Azure blob storage and set up the system to benefit from a machine learning algorithm in the future. In the following project he not only excelled as a machine learning engineer, digitalizing paper documents, he also took part in our technical architect mentoring program and is eager to take over new responsibilities in an upcoming project. John is an absolute inspiration to all of us at Cloudflight and we are honored to count him both as a colleague and a friend.
