'Augmentation', prosthetics and man-machine interfaces
15 May 2020 - There are two projectsUniversità Campus Bio-Medico di Roma to win the FET Open Horizon 2020 call, a call with which the EU finances research projects on emerging technologies and radically new ideas with high risk and high gain (total funding value per UCBM over 1 million euros). Indeed, they are frontier studies, like what you see as principal investigator Loredana Zollo, head of the Advanced Robotics and Person-Centered Technologies Unit, and which aims to develop low-invasive bidirectional interfacing solutions with the peripheral nervous system for prosthetic applications, placing itself as an alternative to neural electrodes, which instead require to be surgically implanted in the nerves of the amputee.
The proposed technology adopts miniaturized ultrasound probes both for myoelectric control of the prosthesis and for restoring somatic sensations to the amputee. With an international network in which there are, among others, the Fraunhofer-Institut für Biomedizinische Technik engaged in the development of ultrasound probes, the University College of London responsible for the development of miniaturized electronics, Imperial College studying the control prosthesis myoelectric, UCBM is responsible for the development of the stimulation and elicitation techniques of somatic sensations and of the sensorized prosthesis, as well as for the integration and validation of the SOMA prosthetic system, comparing it with both transcutaneous and intramural state-of-the-art stimulation techniques. The Robotics Unit, in collaboration with the Clinical Units of Neurology, Orthopedics and Physical and Rehabilitative Medicine, will then coordinate the final experimentation on humans, which will be made possible after the experimental verification of the ultrasound interfaces on an in vitro model of the somatosensory system and of the muscle, developed by the University of Naples Federico II, and the study on animal model carried out by the Autonomous University of Barcelona. The project also involves the Ossur company, world leader in the production of prostheses, and the Inail Prosthesis Center in Vigorso di Budrio for human trials.
Instead, it belongs to the Human-Technology Interaction Neurophysiology and Neuroengineering Unit (Next Lab) directed by Giovanni Di Pino the NIMA project, in collaboration with Albert-Ludwigs-Universitaet Freiburg, Imperial College, Sorbonne and Fondazione Tecnalia, with the coordination for Ucbm of Domenico Formica. Also in this case, an international team of experts in neuroscience, neurotechnology, human-machine interfaces, robotics and ethics works together for a challenging technology: a third artificial arm that can be controlled by man, to increase - in fact we are talking about 'augmentation' – their skills in complicated contexts, such as in an operating room for a surgeon or in difficult scenarios such as those related to natural disasters. The idea is that of a wearable arm, designed this time not to recover lost functions but to add others in parallel to those with which man is already endowed. A perspective that opens up new ethical, neuroscientific and engineering scenarios on which the team will work UCBM: from the dimension of the control which must necessarily be characterized by a low cognitive load for the user to that of the restitution of sensory information, in a line of research consistent with the work of the NEXT Lab group in recent years, also carried out at the inside the Enable project.
