How first-hand experience leads to innovation.

maxon quality engineer Noëlle Bracher is used to trying things out for herself. She tells us what helped her become a better engineer. 

Noëlle Bracher
had already gained a considerable amount of practical experience when she started at maxon. During her studies in medical technology at ETH Zurich, Noëlle specialized in exoskeletons for the rehabilitation of people with disorders of the nervous system, such as paraplegia and strokes. For her master’s thesis, the 26-year-old from Bern developed a prototype for treating nerve-related pain, also called neuropathic pain, in individuals with amputations. She did this using virtual reality and sensory feedback from electrical nerve stimulation.

Noëlle tested the virtual reality thoroughly for herself until she had it all figured out. Sometimes, all these tests, and carrying them out with limited programming knowledge, were a major headache – also in the literal sense of the word. “That was the first time I worked with virtual reality,” Noëlle recalls. “My animations appeared on screen with a time delay and at the end of the day, I felt so seasick that the system was triggering pain rather than relieving it.” One day, Noëlle no longer felt so dizzy on her way home from the laboratory. “Experiencing my progress first-hand by being able to test the system on my own body boosted my self-confidence immensely.”

She also used this method of carrying out tests personally in other projects. For an internship, Noëlle worked on a device for arm rehabilitation that counteracts gravity. “Of course, I tried out the prototype for myself several times as well,” she says. To assess its user-friendliness, she went with a team to visit patients and therapists in rehabilitation centers and hospitals in Switzerland.

During another internship, Noëlle worked together with engineers on an exoskeleton for paraplegic people, which has joints that are pre-tensioned by springs. The team wanted to establish whether this “variable stiffness” had a beneficial effect when walking on uneven ground. The patients also needed crutches to steady themselves while standing and walking. To evaluate the effect of the spring tension when wearing the exoskeleton, the engineers had to measure how heavily a test participant relied on their crutches. For this reason, Noëlle measured the muscular activity in the shoulders and arms while the stiffness of the exoskeleton was modified. The exoskeleton was equipped with maxon components, namely the EC 90 flat motors, MILE encoders, and ESCON controllers. “This sparked my interest in maxon and I applied for this job,” Noëlle says.

«Having a boring job would be the worst. After working here for more than a year, I am sure that I will never get bored at maxon.»

Today, Noëlle works for the maxon medical technology unit in Sachseln, Switzerland. “As a quality engineer, my focus is on the documentation, which is typical for this job: I go through project documents and create new templates that are based on customer requirements.” Her tasks today admittedly involve less contact with patients than during her internships, but that experience has helped her to communicate better with her team and the customers.

Noëlle tested the virtual reality thoroughly for herself until she had it all figured out.

“I now work on various projects in a team, where everyone contributes their particular know-how and has corresponding tasks,” Noëlle explains. The wide range of expertise and perspectives at maxon are a welcome change to her experience in the scientific world, where most students or professors share similar interests and views on the same topic. “I love working with people from different backgrounds and sectors in a dynamic environment. I follow a product over its entire development process.”
 

Noëlle knows that her contribution at maxon is not as evident as in her earlier projects, where she was dealing directly with patients and medical staff. However, she can see the big picture now: “The projects during my time in college were research-oriented, meaning that only a few patients could use the technology, because it was not commercially available,” she says. “When customers of maxon develop a medical product and launch it on the market, considerably more patients benefit directly from it.”

For Noëlle, it is all about the patients. While working on her master’s thesis, she learned that chronic, neuropathic pain is particularly complex. “Even though we are seeing tremendous progress in medicine and technology, it is still very difficult to treat this kind of pain,” she says. Over time, this can cause patients to feel anxious, helpless, and depressed.

Helping patients with chronic pain made Noëlle’s studies particularly meaningful. Today, she still draws inspiration from all that early practical experience: “On some projects, we at maxon are really pushing the boundaries of technology, which is quite exciting,” the quality engineer says happily.

“No two days are the same when you work on projects,” she adds, but that is exactly what this quality engineer likes. “Having a boring job would be the worst. After working here for more than a year, I am sure that I will never get bored at maxon.”