The BioInterNect project is a research project promoted by INAIL in collaboration between theItalian Institute of Technology, the INAIL Prosthesis Centre, the  BioRobotics Institute of the Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna and the Bio-Medical Campus in Rome.

Wearable rehabilitation devices, such as bionic prostheses and exoskeletons, base their functioning on close collaboration with the patient. For this reason, the interfaces between patient and aid require a rich two-way exchange of information at the sensorimotor level, such that the biological and robotic systems can operate synergistically. The interfaces are therefore of fundamental importance in improving the functionality and acceptability of the robotic aid, having the role of relaying information from the patient to the machine and vice versa, so that both can consequently react and collaborate to reach the common target. Interfaces possess an intrinsic multimodality, processing biosignals in ways that depend on various factors, including the biological structure with which they interact and the level at which the interaction takes place, the invasiveness and the functions they have to perform.

The aim of the BioInterNect project is to develop new patient-user interface systems, with the aim of promoting the retrieval of complex motor patterns by enriching the quantity and quality of feedback information to the user. The application focus will be on scenarios already addressed in previous INAIL research projects: the use-cases of prosthetics, rehabilitation/assistive robotics and urinary system stimulation for incontinence treatment will be considered. The systems will be able to adopt neuromorphic and event-driven technologies for encoding and decoding signals, and realise their biomimetic coding that can improve the naturalness of sensory perception by the patient in the aforementioned application scenarios.

PROMOTING INSTITUTION: INAIL
MAIN PARTNER: Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia
GRANT NAME: PR23-PAS-P2
PERIOD AND DURATION: 2023-2026 (36 mesi)
SSSA FUNDING: € 690.000,00