Thesis Project Form

The field of low-cost haptics has recently enabled the development of wearable systems that seek to guide users’ movements throughout vibrotactile feedback. In fact, vibrotactile feedback can be used to teach whole-body motion skills for rehabilitation, since it provides corrective feedback at the user attempts to perform desired motions. Additionally, learning motions throughout vibrotactile feedback instead that visually mirroring an example and/or receiving verbal cues, has thought to have the potential to improve learning and accuracy of movements. This project aims at developing a low-cost lightweight wearable suit for the re-education of body movements throughout vibrotactile feedback. The suit will be comprised of IMUs sensors enabling to monitor kinematics and a set of vibrators providing vibrotactile feedback for the rehabilitation purpose.

The proposed thesis has 3 main aims:
- Aim 1: Design and develop the wearable suit by choosing the best actuators and IMUs to use.
- Aim 2: Investigate the different modalities throughout which vibrotactile feedback is provided.
- Aim 3: Test the feasibility of the products on healthy subjects.

The student will learn to:
1. Programming a Microcontroller for signal acquisition
2. Acquire and analyze data from wearable sensors
3. Develop exercises exploiting the different modalities of vibrotactile feedback
4. Integrating body signals with the exercises for the rehabilitation purpose.
5. Improve the knowledge of C# and statistical analysis