As the technician you will be part of a team of PhDs, postdoctoral researchers, and programmers. Your role is to help build the required hardware, firmware, and software for an iterative pipeline that can be used to validate wearables/apps that aim to measure the multicomponent stress response in daily life. The validation takes place in part in our existing laboratory setup, which you help maintain and improve, and in part by proven wearable technology (www.vu-ams.nl) which you also help maintain and improve. The aim of the combined laboratory and ambulatory validation protocol is to test whether digital markers of stress have the appropriate accuracy, test-retest reliability, and construct validity.
The research team will rely on your support for the procurement, the appropriate installation and usage, and the data extraction from existing but also newly arising wearables. These can be aimed mainly at the consumer-market or mainly at academic researchers. Where needed, this technology will be adapted in co-creation with end-users and manufacturers. You also build 'bridging' technology that helps combine these wearables into a larger stress measurement toolkit.
You will become part of a large and active national community of over 20+ PhD students and 10+ postdocs and 5+ technician and programmers who will work on the Stress-in-Action project at different institutions. For the longer term perspective, we will offer you an early involvement in a start-up company around wearable solutions developed at the VU.

• Education in electrical engineering or related field (HBO/HTS or equivalent)
• Experience with embedded systems, hardware and firmware development
• Knowledge of low power consumption techniques (e.g. Bluetooth Low Energy)
• Good programming skills in C/C++/C#
• Affinity with a human-centered research setting, experience with wearables a plus
• Comfortable reading and conversing in English
• Overall good communication and social skills
• Supportive team player with a can-do attitude
• Interest in supervision of electrical and software engineering internship students

Fixed-term contract: 1 year.

A challenging position in a socially involved organization. On full-time basis the remuneration amounts to a minimum gross monthly salary of €3,098 (scale 9) and a maximum €4,670 (scale 10), depending on your education and experience. The job profile: is based on the university job ranking system and is vacant for at least 0.8 FTE.

The initial employment contract will affect a period of 1 year.
Additionally, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam offers excellent fringe benefits and various schemes and regulations to promote a good work/life balance, such as:

• a maximum of 41 days of annual leave based on full-time employment,
• 8% holiday allowance and 8.3% end-of-year bonus,
• solid pension scheme (ABP),
• contribution to commuting expenses,
• optional model for designing a personalized benefits package

Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

The ambition of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam is clear: to contribute to a better world through outstanding education and ground-breaking research. We strive to be a university where personal development and commitment to society play a leading role. A university where people from different disciplines and backgrounds collaborate to achieve innovations and to generate new knowledge. Our teaching and research encompass the entire spectrum of academic endeavor - from the humanities, the social sciences and the natural sciences through to the life sciences and the medical sciences.

Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam is home to more than 30,000 students. We employ over 5,500 individuals. The VU campus is easily accessible and located in the heart of Amsterdam's Zuidas district, a truly inspiring environment for teaching and research.

Diversity
We are an inclusive university community. Diversity is one of our most important values. We believe that engaging in international activities and welcoming students and staff from a wide variety of backgrounds enhances the quality of our education and research. We are always looking for people who can enrich our world with their own unique perspectives and experiences.

Faculty of Behavioural and Movement Sciences
The Faculty of Behavioural and Movement Sciences focuses on the broad domain of behaviour and health. Our teaching and research programmes are devoted to current developments in society, from healthy aging to e-health, from juvenile crime to dealing with depression, from training for top athletes to social media as a teaching tool. We are unique in that we combine three academic disciplines: psychology, movement sciences and education.

Working at Behavioural and Movement Sciences means working in an ambitious organization that is characterized by an informal atmosphere and short lines of communication. Our faculty offers tremendous scope for personal development. We employ more than 600 staff members, and we are home to around 3,400 students.

About the department
At the department Biological Psychology of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam we conduct research and education on the causes of individual differences in health behaviours and disease outcomes. It is a department with a long tradition in stress research where enthusiastic and ambitious academics work on generating knowledge and translating this to improvements in health and wellbeing. Our research on the role of genetic and environmental factors - including stress- belongs to the international top. For the Stress-in-Action project, there is a close connection with researchers and technicians from the Amsterdam UMC, University Twente, Erasmus Medical Center, the University of Groningen and its UMC Groningen, and Utrecht University.

About the project
In this project, 25 multidisciplinary scientists from six Dutch Universities collaborate around the theme 'stress in daily life'. Divided over three Research Themes and three Support Cores, the Stress-in-Action consortium, we will validate daily-life stress assessments, examine which contextual factors contribute to the experience of daily-life stress, and examine how daily-life stress leads to the development of both mental and cardiometabolic diseases. The project is funded through the Dutch Scientific Organization under the Gravitation program. More details can be found here: www.stress-in-action.nl.