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Thesis Project Form

Title (tentative): Development of a wheelchair accessible driving simulator for training people with motor impairment

Thesis advisor(s): Casadio Maura, Andrea CANESSA (DIBRIS); Antonino MASSONE (Santa Corona, Spinal Cord Unit); Angelo BASTERIS (University of Southern Denmark); Fulvio Mastrogiovanni (DIBRIS). Amy Bellitto (Santa Corona, Spinal Cord Unit); Serena Ricci (SimAv). E-mail:
Address: Via Opera Pia 13, 16145 Genova (ITALY) Phone: (+39) 010 33 52749
Description

Motivation and application domain
Adapted driving simulators offer people with motor impairment a mean to re-learn driving in a safe and controlled environment. Commercial, high-end driving simulators cost runs in the one hundred-thousand-dollar range, require large amounts of space and are hence not useful in a clinical environment. Furthermore, most of the systems are not directly accessible to wheelchairs and many lack of immersivity, thus not providing a fully realistic driving experience.

General objectives and main activities
Starting from a first prototype of the driving simulator, the student is required to work in a multidisciplinary team (i.e. engineers, clinicians, physical therapists, end users), in order to add features to the simulator such as:

-the possibility to use commercial controllers typically installed in an adapted car
-personalization of the training
-measure of biological measures (i.e. EMG, EEG, EKG, pupillary response, skin conductance)
-performance indexes (speed, acceleration, time and occurrence of a wrong-way lane crossing etc.)

All these metrics will allow the evaluation of subject’s behavioural responses from which to assess the performance and the degree of driving skill of the subject, the effect on driving of medications and subject fitness to drive. The acquisition of different biosignals instead would unmask the timely contribution of anxiety, arousal, and fear to drive and would allow an investigation of the re-learning process and the compensatory/adaptive mechanisms that occurs during driving practice.

Training Objectives (technical/analytical tools, experimental methodologies)
This thesis aims to develop an accessible, highly realistic driving simulator that will:
- Allow patients to freely practice driving during their hospital stay;
- Offer an immersive virtual reality environment;
- Allow to investigate how patients recover their ability to drive;
- Allow developing a quantitative assessment of individual driving skills;
- Allow to verify the effects of different medications that can impact driving abilities
- Test the simulator with motor impaired people

Place(s) where the thesis work will be carried out: • DIBRIS • SimAV • Spinal Cord Unit, Santa Corona Hospital, Pietra Ligure

Additional information

Maximum number of students: 1