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.

About the project

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.

As an EngD, you will:

• 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.

Information and application

Are you interested in this position? Please send your application via the '' button below before June 30, 2026, and include:

• A Curriculum Vitae, including a list of all courses attended and grades obtained, and, if applicable, a list of publications and references.
• A cover letter (maximum 2 pages of A4), emphasising your specific interest, qualifications, and motivations to apply for this position.
• An IELTS-test, Internet TOEFL test (TOEFL-iBT), or a Cambridge CAE-C (CPE).General information about EngD (formerly PDEng) programmes you can find here.For more information regarding this position, you are welcome to contact (Monique Tabak m.tabak@utwente.nl)

For more information regarding this position, you are welcome to contact Monique Tabak via the following email adress: m.tabak@utwente.nl.

The first round of interviews will be held in the first week of July 2026.

Screening is part of the selection process.

About the organisation

The faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science (EEMCS) uses mathematics, electronics and computer technology to contribute to the development of Information and Communication Technology (ICT). With ICT present in almost every device and product we use nowadays, we embrace our role as contributors to a broad range of societal activities and as pioneers of tomorrow's digital society. As part of a tech university that aims to shape society, individuals and connections, our faculty works together intensively with industrial partners and researchers in the Netherlands and abroad, and conducts extensive research for external commissioning parties and funders. Our research has a high profile both in the Netherlands and internationally. It has been accommodated in three multidisciplinary UT research institutes: Mesa+ Institute, TechMed Centre and Digital Society Institute.