Reaching for better hand function
Jose Zariffa
KITE FIBRE CRANIA
Jose Zariffa
Dr. Zariffa is a Senior Scientist and the Associate Director, Scientific at KITE, where he holds the KITE Chair in Spinal Cord Injury Research. He is an Associate Professor at the Institute of Biomedical Engineering, University of Toronto. He received his Ph.D. degree in electrical and biomedical engineering from the University of Toronto. He then completed post-doctoral fellowships at the International Collaboration On Repair Discoveries (ICORD) in Vancouver, Canada, and at the Toronto Rehabilitation Institute. Dr. Zariffa’s research focuses on developing technology for upper limb neurorehabilitation. For example, to evaluate the true impact of rehabilitation strategies on daily life, his team is developing a system to measure hand function at home using wearable cameras. Looking at the next generation of assistive technologies, he is learning how to intercept and interpret neural signals to create direct interfaces with the nervous system. He is a recipient of an Ontario Early Researcher Award, and his team was awarded the Grand Prize in the Spinal Cord Rehab Innovation Challenge, a national competition focused on new tools to measure rehab activities and their impact.