• After three decades shaping digital health at the Swiss technology innovation center, Krauss prepares to hand over leadership.
  
  
• Peterhans will join CSEM as the Canton of Bern strengthens its position as a leading Swiss location for medtech innovation and technology transfer.
  
  
• The transition comes as wider use of sensor technologies and AI reshapes the future of digital health and medicine.
  
  
• Peterhans brings deep experience in medtech, entrepreneurship, and leadership. He will build on CSEM’s track record of contributing technologies to real-world products, from Tissot connected watches to an FDA-cleared optical blood pressure monitoring system.

Neuchâtel, 15 September 2026 – After three decades of pioneering work in digital health, Jens Krauss is preparing to hand over the reins at CSEM. The Swiss technology innovation center has appointed medtech entrepreneur Matthias Peterhans as its next Vice President Medtech. Peterhans will join CSEM on November 1, 2026, and take over the role in summer 2027. The transition comes as widely available sensors and AI create new possibilities in health care. Together, these technologies can turn large volumes of health data into information that helps doctors and patients make decisions. At the same time, CSEM’s Bern site brings applied research, care providers, and industry closer together. This helps to strengthen the Canton of Bern’s position as a leading Swiss location for medtech innovation.

AI is opening new possibilities for making sense of the growing volumes of health data generated by medical devices and wearables. Technology is moving beyond measuring and monitoring toward interpreting complex health signals, supporting clinical decisions, and enabling more personalized care.

At the same time, bringing these technologies to patients is becoming more demanding. In Europe, AI‑enabled medical devices may need to meet requirements under both existing medical device rules and the EU AI Act. For Swiss medtech innovators, this adds another layer of complexity to an already demanding route to European and international markets.

The challenge is no longer only what technology can do. It is how to turn innovation into trusted, clinically validated, and market-ready medical solutions.

“Jens Krauss has helped CSEM anticipate and shape successive waves of digital health innovation for three decades,” says Alexandre Pauchard, CEO of CSEM. “AI now expands what technology can do for health care. But turning that potential into trusted solutions takes more than an algorithm. It takes an understanding of clinical needs, structured development, responsible clinical validation, and a strong grasp of regulation. It also requires clear paths to value creation for industry. Matthias Peterhans has spent his career bringing these worlds together, making him ideally positioned to lead our medtech activities into their next phase.”

From spaceflight to the wrist

Krauss’s career spans much of the evolution of modern wearable health technology. Before joining CSEM in 1996, he worked on biomechanical software for a European Space Agency human spaceflight mission.

At CSEM, he helped pioneer continuous, unobtrusive vital sign monitoring. Some of CSEM’s early work tackled an extreme challenge: monitoring astronauts’ health remotely. Devices had to be small, reliable, and highly energy efficient while continuously capturing meaningful health signals.

Over the following decades, Krauss helped move wearable sensing from applied research into the real world. In 2001, he was among the inventors behind CSEM’s first patent for continuous pulse monitoring from the wrist using opto-inertial technology. The team also developed a heart-rate monitoring concept about 14 years before the Apple Watch came to market. That early work later reached commercial wearables, including through Nokia spin-off PulseOn.

Today, CSEM’s optical health-monitoring technologies appear in products from Tissot to Festina. Signant Health, formerly ActiGraph, also uses CSEM’s technology in major clinical studies, extending its impact from everyday health monitoring to medical research.

That same drive to translate applied research into real-world impact helped lay the foundations for Aktiia, now Hilo. Its clinically validated continuous blood pressure technology grew from applied research that began at CSEM in 2007. That work later helped the company secure US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) clearance for its optical blood pressure monitoring system.

“When we began working on wearable monitoring, one of the big questions was whether we could reliably capture physiological information outside the hospital,” says Krauss. “Today, we can generate extraordinary amounts of continuous health data. AI opens possibilities we could only have imagined 30 years ago.

But a breakthrough in applied research is only the beginning. The real achievement is turning technology into something industry, clinicians, and patients can use and trust. I believe Matthias Peterhans takes over at one of the most exciting moments in digital health.”

From sensing to holistic care

After decades of improving how wearable devices capture signals from the human body, the next question is what we can learn from them. The challenge is how we can turn that intelligence into solutions that reach patients.

It is a challenge that closely matches Peterhans’s experience. For more than 20 years, he has taken medical technologies from research and clinical validation through regulatory approval and into international markets. As co-founder and CEO of CAScination AG, he led surgical navigation technologies through clinical validation, European conformity (CE marking), FDA clearance, and commercialization. He later co-founded ender diagnostics AG and helped rapidly scale a diagnostic product and service provider from five to more than 200 employees.

Today, as COO of Xovis AG, Peterhans brings experience leading complex international operations. He also serves as an expert for Innosuisse, evaluating innovation projects and start-up funding proposals. He recently complemented this experience by completing the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) executive program in AI in Health Care.

“CSEM has built an exceptional foundation in technologies that have changed what is possible in digital health,” says Peterhans. “The opportunity now is to combine that engineering expertise with AI and a close clinical collaboration, helping leading technologies become successful solutions for healthcare.”

“I look forward to working alongside Jens Krauss and his team over the coming months, learning from what they have built and bringing my own experience in medtech, entrepreneurship, and clinical translation to CSEM’s next phase,” says Peterhans.

Peterhans will work alongside Krauss during a planned transition and assume full leadership of CSEM’s medtech activities in summer 2027. The transition comes as CSEM expands its clinically driven medtech activities in the Canton of Bern. Its collaboration with Insel Gruppe and the University of Bern has led to 32 projects since 2023, spanning medical devices, continuous monitoring, diagnostics, and AI.

For Krauss, the handover brings three decades of digital health innovation full circle, from learning how to continuously sense the human body to exploring how AI can help us understand what those signals mean.