Driving companions

Part 1: project profile

Project name

Driving companions

Project short description

The project is aimed at studying the possibility to model the affective state of a patient involved in a robotic-assisted rehabilitation therapy session.

Dates

Start date: 2007/11/09

End date: 2008/11/09

People involved

Project heads

Andrea Bonarini - bonarini (at) elet (dot) polimi (dot) it

Matteo Matteucci - matteucc (at) elet (dot) polimi (dot) it

Other Politecnico di Milano people

Simone Tognetti - tognetti (at) elet (dot) polimi (dot) it

Students

Students that have worked on the project

Alex Pasquali

Luca Preziati

Laboratory work and risk analysis

Laboratory work for this project will be mainly performed at AIRLab/Lambrate. It will include electrical and electronic activity. Potentially risky activities are the following:

• Use of soldering iron. Standard safety measures described in Safety norms will be followed.
• Use of high-voltage circuits. Special gloves and a current limiter will be used.
• Robot testing. Standard safety measures described in Safety norms will be followed.
• Use of a modified (human-guided) golf cart. We will use the cart only in open-air environments.

Part 2: project description

We would like to recognize states like stress, involvement, boredom, from physiological data taken by non-invasive sensors and from other data sources, such as video images taken during the session. The final goal is the improvement of the rehabilitation behaviour of the robot, which will be adapted to the affective state of the patient.

We have defined protocols for data acquisition and actually performed data acquisition on the partner site, Fondazione Maugeri. We are also implementing new robots to improve the experimental activity.

The project is co-funded by the Italian Institute of Technology and is developed in collaboration with the Department of Bioengineering of the Politecnico di Milano and the Maugeri Foundation.