Thesis Project Form

With the advancement of technology, virtual reality (VR) employed a major role in several applications, spacing from the entertainment to the rehabilitation and training realms. However, presently, “immersive” devices only involve the visual and auditory systems, providing the user with a dissonance. A partial compensation of this problem is the inclusion of the somatosensory system in the virtual world, beguiling the body to be in the real world: indeed, in our daily living, the objects’ manipulation involves the so-called haptic sense. The multimodal inclusion of sensory feedback, i.e., haptics, would offer user a completely immersive virtual environment

Haptic feedback is a paramount sensorial modality for improving embodiment in Virtual Reality (VR) applications.
Neuromuscular electrical stimulation (NMES) could be a potential tool to provide realistic feelings during virtual object interactions. During the traineeship the student will design and develop an experimental setup by connecting the “ALEx-RS” bimanual exoskeleton with the suit “Teslasuit” equipped with electrodes for muscle stimulation. The project will consist of programming a virtual environment that should be as immersive as possible due to the forces generated by the exoskeleton and the muscle stimulation provided by the suit. An experimental protocol will be defined and tested on healthy subjects (>12 subjects).

At the end of the traineeship the student will be able to control at a high level the ALEx-RS exoskeleton (programmed in c# on Visual studio platform), to develop virtual environments (in Unity), to calibrate and generate stimulations faithful to the desired haptic stimulus on the Teslasuit (native suit program). Will expand his knowledge in Matlab to perform data analysis.