It's Dr. Giovanni Di Pino. His idea, which promises to revolutionize current research strategies in the development of hand prostheses for amputees, has won the prestigious European ERC-Starting Grant call
Rome, 5 November 2015 – A young researcher from theUniversità Campus Bio-Medico di Roma It is among the top young scientists of Europe: it's called Giovanni Di Pino, is 36 years old and has his own research project RESHAPE is among those selected by over thirty great scientists – including some Nobel Prize winners – who are part of the Commission of theEuropean Research Council.
Brussels experts have it chosen from the nearly 3 applications sent for gang ERC Starting Grant, one of the most competitive in Europe, which receives funding up to an amount equal to 1,5 million euro. "A contest - Explains Andrea Onetti Muda, Rector ofUniversità Campus Bio-Medico di Roma which sees just 3,8% of all Italian proposals as winners and 10% of those presented at European level”. Moreover, according to the data of theEuropean Research Council, last year only a third of the young Italian researchers who won the starting grant, which attributes the funds directly to the principal investigator and not to the scientific body, then remained in Italy to conduct his own research (9 out of 28).
The RESHAPE project (Storing the Self with embodiable HAnd ProsthesesEs) was born from listening to the needs of upper limb amputees and is focused on one new conception in the development of neural controlled prostheses, which starts from the patient's needs and not from the technological and engineering development of the prosthesis. This in order to allow a 'quality leap' in the comfort with which amputees 'feel' the artificial hand, to make them perceive it as their own. It is still a design idea, but if Di Pino and his research team are able to successfully implement it within the next five years, as envisaged in the tender, the result would surpass the many steps forward made so far in the sector, because would move the point from which you tackle the problem: from the construction of prostheses resulting from the evolution of industrial robotics, to the design of devices conceived starting from human brain sensations and processes.
To this end, the project intends to use all the most recent neurophysiological knowledge for ininvestigate the brain processes that lead the human brain to conceive an external object as 'integrated' into our body: from the nerve sites to be stimulated to arouse particular motor sensations of the upper limb, to the characteristics that can transform a bio-mechatronic prosthesis from a bioelectrical and biomechanical point of view into a human hand, up to the qualities of the neural impulses that allow, in a controlled way , Of convincing an amputee's brain that the body has the missing hand again.
Out of the ordinary, in addition to the project, it is also the academic and personal history of Di Pino. After graduating in Medicine and Surgery, in fact, she underwent a serious accident which impaired its mobility. However, the new doctor continued his studies at home, discovering the world of neural interfaces, communication systems that allow the human nervous system to be directly 'connected' with external digital equipment. Convinced by the professors of the Campus Bio-Medico to return to the University, he first obtained the PhD in Bioengineering, and then embark on the path of specialization in Neurology, thanks to which he also deepened the medical-clinical side applied to these research topics. An Italian 'brain' that has been able to take up the challenge of linking bioengineering and medicine to build the scientific premises with which to try to give new hope to many amputees. And who chose to do so while staying in our country.
