DrPetra Karlsson

Dr Karlsson's the Program Lead for Technology (direct line manager to three researchers and research assistants) and Senior Research Fellow, Cerebral Palsy Alliance Research Institute, The University of Sydney. Dr Karlsson is an Occupational Therapist with a PhD (2014) in Assistive Technology and cerebral palsy.

Dr Karlsson’s program of research focuses on bringing allied health and biomedical engineering together, in assistive technology, to support communication, cognitive assessment and functioning in daily activities for individuals living with severe cerebral palsy. She currently holds a NHRMC IDEAS grant $1.1M (CIA) to build My Voice Library, a repository of high-quality audio and visual datasets which will be used by engineers and programmers to enable personalised real-time communication. Dr Karlsson leads the international research group of clinicians, researchers and people with CP called Eyes on Communication [ResearchGate].The international collaboration has recently resulted in the development of international guidelines for eye-gaze control technology assessment and implementation for all key stakeholders (Karlsson et al., 2021).