PhD in Sustainable development and cooperation

Contacts

Supervisor

Curriculum vitae

Research activities

With the supervision of Prof. Marco Lanzilotto, I am currently working on the FEELIGHT project that has the ambition to develop a neuroprosthetic device that will be able to improve the quality of life for patients with cortical blindness thanks to his function as a rehabilitative support. At the beginning of this second year, we continued to work on modifying the initial paradigm for preliminary EMGs recording from healthy subjects, to possibly identify problems. At the end, we still couldn’t replicate the well-known results according to literature. Therefore, after several meetings with the company, we decided not to use EMGs signals as our target for the implementation of the artificial neural network as planned regarding the development of the FEELIGHT prototype. After several discussions we decided to work with object recognition algorithms and machine learning models. The idea is to develop a simple, wearable device, constituted by a high-resolution webcam integrated with a speaker, that will be able to identify not only objects in the environment, but also people and their emotional facial expressions: thanks to a feedback delivered through headphones, it could act as a real-time voice assistant for visually impaired subjects. To this purpose, I started doing some research on machine learning models and started a hands-on training with object recognition algorithms to improve my programming skills. After conducting some research, we identified two different algorithms that will be the starting point of our recognition model: one is “YOLOv8”, which is able to detect and recognize objects in real-time; and the other is “DeepFace”, a face recognition and facial attribute analysis (age, gender, emotion) algorithm. We recently started working directly with the company through online meetings to study the two algorithms and to plan the next steps for their implementation for the development of FEELIGHT. The next steps focus on the optimization of the device through data acquisition and analysis on healthy human subjects and non-human primate with cortical blindness. In the last phase, activities will be planned for the dissemination of the achieved goals, the presentation of the results in conferences; publication of the results in scientific journals; organization of meetings with patients, family members, and possible investor partners for phases of further development and  future projects.