EngD AI-agent development personalized osteoarthritis

Job description

The Engineering Doctorate (EngD) programme Business & IT (BIT) offers you a two-year position combining education at the University of Twente with a design project carried out in close collaboration with Ancora Health.

The educational programme will have an in-depth and broadening character, with ample attention for professional development. It will be partly tailored to the design project. The EngD is a two-year post‑master's design programme focused on the direct needs of industry. It combines an educational component with a design project in a professional context.

LoaD is an NWA-ORC funded project that studies osteoarthritis (OA) from genetics to multimodal behavioural and physiological data. This multidisciplinary approach aims to improve understanding of disease progression and enable better management through personalized digital support.

Within this EngD project, the focus is on developing and implementing an AI agent for people with knee OA. Rather than building a generic chatbot or static recommender, you will work on an agentic product concept that can interpret relevant patient data, reason over personalized goals and context, and generate timely recommendations, coaching prompts or actions within a mobile app.

The design challenge is to translate research insights, clinical requirements and software constraints into a coherent product that can be implemented in Ancora Health's mobile application. The first use case is knee osteoarthritis, but the architecture should be designed with broader applicability in mind, for example for other lifestyle‑amenable chronic conditions where digital coaching, self‑management and personalized feedback are relevant.

• Translate an agentic framework into a concrete product design for a personalized digital companion in the mobile app.
• Design and prototype the software architecture, user flows and interaction logic needed to implement the AI agent in a safe and usable way.
• Work with researchers, clinicians, product developers and end‑users to align scientific insights, clinical requirements, technical feasibility and product priorities.
• Support the integration of monitoring data, recommender logic, coaching strategies and agentic reasoning into a coherent product concept.
• Evaluate the usability, feasibility and implementation requirements of the AI agent in a real‑world mobile health context.

• You have, or will shortly acquire, an MSc degree in computer science, biomedical engineering, software engineering, technical medicine with strong software development experience, or a closely related technical study programme.
• You have a strong understanding of software development and are motivated to build working digital products, not only conceptual models or research prototypes.
• You have affinity with, or a clear interest in, mobile applications, eHealth, digital therapeutics or remote patient support.
• You are interested in applied AI, agentic frameworks, recommender systems, personalization, human‑AI interaction or responsible AI in healthcare.
• You enjoy translating user needs and clinical requirements into practical product and software design choices.
• You are self‑starting, product‑minded and comfortable taking ownership of a project with multiple academic, clinical and industry stakeholders.
• You have excellent collaboration and communication skills and can work with technical and non‑technical stakeholders.
• Applicants with a non‑Dutch qualification and who have not had secondary and tertiary education in English can only be admitted with an IELTS test showing a total band score of at least 6.5, an internet TOEFL test (TOEFL‑iBT) showing a score of at least 90, or a Cambridge CAE‑C (CPE).

• We offer a very challenging position for two years in an inspiring multidisciplinary and international environment. We offer a tailor‑made post‑master design programme that has an educational component (50%) as well as a design project (50%).
• Your salary and associated conditions are in accordance with the collective labour agreement for Dutch universities (CAO‑NU).
• You will receive a gross monthly salary of…