Student project: Heart Rate Variability and Brain Health

*Important for non-EU students: You'll need to be registered at a Dutch university to meet immigration requirements.

You will be part of the MOCIA group working on how lifestyle changes can improve your brain health.

What you will do

Background
Currently research into lifestyle changes and the effect of the changes on your health is often tested and validated with over 10 questionnaires, multiple MRI scans and tasks and blood and/or feces samples. Although these measurements are very thorough in finding effects, they are also a high burden on participants. Furthermore, if you want to validate if a lifestyle change has any impact on your health outside of a research environment, you often do not have access to these methods. With this student project we want to explore how we could use wearable-derived data, specifically heart rate variability data, in such way that it could support the monitoring of lifestyle as well as the effect of lifestyle changes on brain health.

In a research consortium (MOCIA) focused on lifestyle and dementia we have collected a dataset, containing around 75 participants. The participants started with a week of measurements, answering a variety of questionnaires, wearing a wearable, providing blood and feces samples and doing some cognitive tasks in an MRI scanner. After that week, the participants joined a lifestyle intervention program of 6 months offering support and training in the domains of physical activity, nutrition, sleep, cognition and stress/mindfulness. After the intervention program, the participants had another week of the same measurements that were taken in the first week.

With this project we would like to explore how well different heart rate variability features correlate to certain biomarkers related to brain health. As outcome of this project, we are aiming to have:

• A heart rate variability feature set which can be used to correlate to parameters related to user’s brain health
• Insights and recommendations in how heart rate variability can be used in a toolkit for understanding and improving brain health.
• A manuscript/publication on the correlations between heart rate variability features and validated methods to capture biomarkers related to brain health.

Your tasks:

• You will continue and expand on the work of a previous intern
• Data preparation, f.e. merging different data types and feature creation
• Perform statistical analysis in python/RStudio
• Discuss and brainstorm on analysis ideas with some experts in the field working at the Donders, RU and/or TU Twente
• Read and analyze literature on physiology, lifestyle and brain health
• Be part of the MOCIA team as well as the data science team
• Report on results, interpretations and suggestions using visualizations  

What we do for you

You will be a student at OnePlanet Research Center, which is a multidisciplinary collaboration between Wageningen University & Research (WUR), Radboud University, Radboud UMC and nano-technology world-player imec. Your work here will not only be of academic relevance, but also translated to practical applications where possible. The feature set you derive will for example be used in a new study within MOCIA.

With this internship, you will be in the unique position collaborating with the academic experts from for example the Donders institute and sensor developers as well as data scientists from Imec. You will experience running a complete data science project including publication options if interested. You will be part of a team where everyone has different backgrounds and subjects of expertise, which makes it fun to exchange perspectives and to work together. 

Who you are

• You are an MSc student in the field of data science.
• You are interested in (mental) health research.
• You are passionate about linking research to development.
• You are available for a period of 6-9 months, starting in May 2026, June 2026 or July 2026.
• You have experience with python and/or R.
• You have experience with statistics.
• Preferably, you have experience with analyzing time series data.
• You are entitled to do an internship in the Netherlands.
• You are a motivated student eager to work independently and expand knowledge in the field.

Interested

Does this position sound like an interesting next step in your career at imec? Don’t hesitate to submit your application by clicking on ‘APPLY’.
Should you have more questions about the job, you can contact jobs@imec.nl.