Marie Muehlhaus

ABOUT ME

Hello there! I am Marie, a fourth-year PhD student in the Human Computer Interaction Lab at Saarland Informatics Campus, Saarland University, supervised by Prof. Dr. Jürgen Steimle. I hold a M.Sc (2021) and B.Sc. (2020) in Computer Science from Saarland University.

My research explores how to design interactions between humans and wearable robots, such as robotic limbs and exoskeletons, through low-fidelity prototyping and empirical user studies. I am especially interested in how we can leverage our body as input and output modality to design seamless and natural human-robot interfaces. I discovered my passion for human-computer interaction in 2020 during a course on interactive systems, where I worked on textile circuits. In my Master's thesis, I developed a soft, gesture-controlled hair interface and evaluated its social acceptability in the field. We published the results at DIS '22. Since then, I have been involved in several projects on wearable robotics, including ExoKit and 3HANDS recently published at CHI '25. Our works received an Honorable Mention Award at UIST '25 and a Best Demo Award at CHI '23 and I was honored with awards for outstanding peer reviews at CHI, UIST and DIS.

Outside of research, I enjoy digital and analog painting, hand lettering, and experimenting with new crafting techniques. Lately, I’ve been exploring (modeling) clay and jewelry making. You can find a few sketches below 🎨 and in the papers ✨.

For more information, feel free to contact me.

PUBLICATIONS

🏅 Move with Style! Enhancing Avatar Embodiment in Virtual Reality through Proprioceptive Motion Feedback (UIST '25)

David Wagmann*+, Marie Muehlhaus* and Jürgen Steimle
(* shared first authors, + advised thesis student)

Learn more.

Update: Great news! Our work won an Honorable Mention Award!

Photo of a woman wearing the exoskeleton prototype.

ExoKit: A Toolkit for Rapid Prototyping of Interactions for Arm-based Exoskeletons (CHI '25)

Marie Muehlhaus, Alexander Liggesmeyer and Jürgen Steimle

ExoKit's hardware and software is open-source. Additional information can be found on the project page.

Update: Exokit was featured on the Arduino Blog! 📝

3HANDS Dataset: Learning from Humans for Generating Naturalistic Handovers with Supernumerary Robotic Limbs (CHI '25)

Artin Saberpour Abadian, Yi-Chi Liao, Ata Otaran, Rishabh Dabral, Marie Muehlhaus, Christian Theobalt, Martin Schmitz and Jürgen Steimle

Learn more.

Interaction Design with Generative AI: An Empirical Study of Emerging Strategies Across the Four Phases of Design (Arxiv '24)

Marie Muehlhaus and Jürgen Steimle

Learn more.

Screenhot of the computational design tool.

WRLKit: Computational Design of Personalized Wearable Robotic Limbs (UIST '23)

Artin Saberpour Abadian, Ata Otaran, Martin Schmitz, Marie Muehlhaus, Rishabh Dabral, Diogo Luvizon, Azumi Maekawa, Masahiko Inami, Christian Theobalt, and Jürgen Steimle

Learn more.

Overview of the works demoed at the Interactivity.

🏆 Design and Fabrication of Body-Based Interfaces (Demo of Saarland HCI Lab) (CHI EA '23)

Jürgen Steimle, Marie Muehlhaus, Madalina Nicolae, Aditya Shekhar Nittala, Narjes Pourjafarian, Adwait Sharma, Marc Teyssier, Marion Koelle, Bruno Fruchard, Paul Strohmeier

Learn more.

Update: Our work won the people's choice best demo award!

Photo of a women with a non-functional prototype of a third arm.

I Need a Third Arm! Eliciting Body-based Interactions with a Wearable Robotic Arm (CHI '23)

Marie Muehlhaus, Marion Koelle, Artin Saberpour Abadian, Jürgen Steimle

Learn more.

Sketch of a women sitting in a café, twirling her hair interface. She wonders if this looks awkward.

FeatherHair: Interacting with Sensorized Hair in Public Settings (DIS '22)

Marie Muehlhaus, Jürgen Steimle, Marion Koelle

The prototype is open-source. Learn more about the project here.

TEACHING

Courses and Seminars

2024/25: Human Computer Interaction - Course (Teaching assistant)
2022-2024: Bachelor and Master Theses Seminar (Organizer)
2024: GenAI Workshop (Leadership of Day 1: Introduction to GenAI in HCI)
2023/24: Engineering of Interactive Systems with Generative AI - Seminar (Organizer, advisor)
2023: Getting Hands-on with Wearable Robotics for Augmenting Human Capabilities - Seminar (advisor)
2022: Interactive Robotics - Seminar (Organizer, Advisor)
2021/22: Interactive Touch Surfaces - Seminar (Advisor)

During my Bachelor and Master studies at Saarland University, I was a student teaching assistant for concurrent programming ('19), programming 1 ('17, '18) and a coach for the Mathematics Preparatory Course for Computer Scientists (2018-2020). Furthermore, I was part of a volunteering team organizing and teaching didactic seminars for future student TAs (2018-2021).