Danilo de rossi

Università di Pisa | UNIPI · Interdepartmental Centre for Bioengineering and Robotics Research “E. Piaggio”

Humanoids have been created for assisting or replacing humans in many applications, providing encouraging results in contexts where social and emotional interaction is required, such as healthcare, education, and therapy. Bioinspiration, that has often guided the design of their bodies and minds, made them also become excellent research tools, prob...

Human communication relies mostly on nonverbal signals expressed through body language. Facial expressions, in particular, convey emotional information that allows people involved in social interactions to mutually judge the emotional states and to adjust its behavior appropriately. First studies aimed at investigating the recognition of facial exp...

Thanks to the new advanced tools and the innovative methods to image deep in the brain at cell resolution, neuroanatomy is quickly redefining its protocols for quantitatively studying neurons in their own three-dimensional arrangement. The huge amount of data generated has to be managed and shared among labs: this need has led us to develop DataBra...

In this work, we present an unobtrusive and non-invasive perception framework based on the synergy between two main acquisition systems: the Touch-Me Pad, consisting of two electronic patches for physiological signal extraction and processing; and the Scene Analyzer, a visual-auditory perception system specifically designed for the detection of soc...

Human motion analysis concerns real-time tracking and recording of subject’s kinematics. The possibility to perform ambulatory and daily-life human motion monitoring would represent a breakthrough for many applications and disciplines. In this context, smart textiles can provide a valid alternative with respect to conventional solid-state sensors t...

The two chemical senses we possess are taste and smell. The design of chemical sensors has evolved from the construction of extremely selective sensors capable of detecting very small quantities of a specific molecule to what can be called chemically broad-band sensors with overlapping sensitivities to different chemical groups. This approach is sy...

Robots are gradually but steadily being introduced in our daily lives. A paramount application is that of education, where robots can assume the role of a tutor, a peer or simply a tool to help learners in a specific knowledge domain. Such endeavor posits specific challenges: affective social behavior, proper modelling of the learner’s progress, di...

Non-verbal signals expressed through body language play a crucial role in multi-modal human communication during social relations. Indeed, in all cultures facial expressions are the most universal and direct signs to express innate emotional cues. A human face conveys important information in social interactions and helps us to better understand ou...

This paper reports the design and assessment of a neuro-fuzzy model to support clinicians during virtual reality therapy. The implemented model is able to automatically recognize the perceived stress levels of the patients by analyzing physiological and behavioral data during treatment. The model, consisting of a self-organizing map and a fuzzy-rul...

Wearable sensing represents an effective manner to correctly recognize hand functional grasps. The need of wearability is strictly related to the minimization of the number of sensors, in order to avoid cumbersome and hence obtrusive systems. In this paper we present a wearable glove, which is able to provide accurate measurements from three joint...

It is increasingly recognized that stress has negative effects on growing numbers of people. Stress assessment is a complex issue, but different studies have shown that monitoring user psychophysiological parameter during daily life can be greatly helpful in stress evaluation. In this context, the European Collaborative Project INTERSTRESS is aimed...

The creation of social empathic communication channels between social robots and humans has started to become reality. Nowadays, the development of empathic and affective agents is giving to scientists another way to explore the social dimension of human beings. In this work, we introduce the FACE humanoid project that aims at creating a social and...

Humanoid social robots that interact with people need to be capable of interpreting the social behavior of their interaction partners in order to respond in a socially appropriate way. In this paper, we present a social behavior interpretation system that enables a humanoid robot to recognize human social behavior by analyzing communicative signals...

Humanoid social robots that interact with people need to be capable of interpreting the social behavior of their interaction partners in order to respond in a socially appropriate way. In this paper, we present a social behav-ior interpretation system that enables a humanoid robot to recognize human social behavior by analyzing communicative signal...

Compared to standard laboratory protocols, the measurement of psychophysiological signals in real world experiments poses technical and methodological challenges due to external factors that cannot be directly controlled. To address this problem, we propose a hybrid approach based on an immersive and human accessible space called the eXperience Ind...

The objective of the INTERACTION Eu project is to develop and validate an unobtrusive and modular system for monitoring daily life activities, physical interactions with the environment and for training upper and lower extremity motor function in stroke subjects. This paper describes the development and preliminary testing of the project sensing pl...

Human gaze and blinking behaviours have been recently considered, to empower humanlike robots to convey a realistic behaviour in a social human-robot interaction. This paper reports the findings of our investigation on human eye-blinking behaviour in relation to human gaze behaviour, in a human-human interaction. These findings then can be used to...

Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) studies have recently received increasing attention in various fields, from academic communities to engineering firms and the media. Many researchers have been focusing on the development of tools to evaluate the performance of robotic systems and studying how to extend the range of robot interaction modalities and con...

This paper presents an innovative wearable kinesthetic glove realized with knitted piezoresistive fabric (KPF) sensor technology. The glove is conceived to capture hand movement and gesture by using KPF in a double layer configuration working as angular sensors (electro-goniometers). The sensing glove prototype is endowed by three KPF goniometers,...

Virtual Reality (VR) is increasingly being used in combination with psycho-physiological measures to improve assessment of distress in mental health research and therapy. However, the analysis and interpretation of multiple physiological measures is time consuming and requires specific skills, which are not available to most clinicians. To address...

Monitoring joint angles through wearable systems enables human posture and gesture to bereconstructed as a support for physical rehabilitation both in clinics and at the patient's home. Anew generation of wearable goniometers based on knitted piezoresistive fabric (KPF) technology ispresented. KPF single-and double-layer devices were designed and c...

The development of systems that allow multimodal interpretation of human-machine interaction is crucial to advance our understanding and validation of theoretical models of user behavior. In particular, a system capable of collecting, perceiving and interpreting unconscious behavior can provide rich contextual information for an interactive system....

This paper describes a context-dependent social gaze-control system implemented as part of a humanoid social robot. The system enables the robot to direct its gaze at multiple humans who are interacting with each other and with the robot. The attention mechanism of the gaze-control system is based on features that have been proven to guide human at...

One of the main challenges in the study of human behavior is to quantitatively assess the participants’ affective states by measuring their psychophysiological signals in ecologically valid conditions. The quality of the acquired data, in fact, is often poor due to artifacts generated by natural interactions such as full body movements and gestures...

This paper presents a kinesthetic glove realized with knitted piezoresistive fabric (KPF) sensor technology. The glove forefinger area is sensorized by two KPF goniometers obtained on the same piezoresistive substrate. The piezoresistive textile is used for the realization of both electrogoniometers and connections, thus avoiding mechanical constra...

Patients affected by motor disorders of the hand and having residual voluntary movements of fingers or wrist can benefit from self-rehabilitation exercises performed with so-called dynamic hand splints. These systems consist of orthoses equipped with elastic cords or springs, which either provide a sustained stretch or resist voluntary movements of...

Two perspectives define a human being in his social sphere: appearance and behaviour. The aesthetic aspect is the first significant element that impacts a communication while the behavioural aspect is a crucial factor in evaluating the ongoing interaction. In particular, we have more expectations when interacting with anthropomorphic robots and we...

A context-aware attention system is fundamental for regulating the robot behaviour in a social interaction since it enables social robots to actively select the right environmental stimuli at the right time during a multiparty social interaction. This contribution presents a modular context-aware attention system which drives the robot gaze. It is...

We live in an era of data deluge and this requires novel tools to effectively extract, analyze and understand the massive amounts of data produced by the study of natural and artificial phenomena in many areas of research. We built a mixed reality system that uses multi-modal input and output and permits embodied interaction with large datasets. On...

In this paper a novel and efficient computational implementation of a Spiking Neuron-Astrocyte Network (SNAN) is reported. Neurons are modeled according to the Izhikevich formulation and the neuron-astrocyte interactions are intended as tripartite synapsis and modeled with the previously proposed nonlinear transistor-like model. Concerning the lear...

Stress is an increasingly recognized phenomenon that has negative effects on growing numbers of people. Stress assessment is a complex issue, but different studies have shown that monitoring user psychophysiological parameter during daily life can be greatly helpful in stress evaluation. In this study a wearable biosensor platform able to collect p...

Today's increasingly large and complex databases require novel and machine aided ways of exploring data. To optimize the selection and presentation of data, we suggest an unconventional approach. Instead of exclusively relying on explicit user input to specify relevant information or to navigate through a data space, we exploit the power and potent...

We live in an era of data deluge and this requires novel tools to ef- fectively extract, analyze and understand the massive amounts of data produced by the study of natural and artificial phenomena in many areas of research. We built a mixed reality system that uses multi-modal input and output and permits embodied interaction with large datasets....

Measuring and monitoring through wearable technology parameters related to human movement, posture, and gesture are gaining momentum because of their wide range of potential applications in daily-life conditions. In previous studies, carbon elastomers (CEs) have been used as strain sensors. Recent developments of CE sensors mathematical modeling de...

Stress is an increasingly recognized phenomenon that has negative effects on growing numbers of people. Stress assessment is a complex issue, but different studies have shown that monitoring user psychophysiological parameter during daily life can be greatly helpful in stress evaluation. In this study a wearable biosensor platform able to collect p...

Recent R&D solutions for e-health and m-health in terms of wearables offer new, sophisticated devices and systems, which might transform healthcare delivery through telemonitoring and telerehabilitation. In this paper the authors briefly introduce the field and the socioeconomic driving forces behind its rapid development. Wearable devices and syst...

Buckling dielectric elastomer actuators are a special type of electromechanical transducers that exploit electro-elastic instability phenomena to generate large out-of-plane axial-symmetric deformations of circular membranes made of non-conductive rubbery material. In this paper a simplified explicit analytical model and a general monolithic finite...

In this chapter polyelectrolyte intelligent gels are examined along three broad lines. The effects of different physical, chemical and biological stimuli on gels response are analysed and mechanisms of response are outlined. The broad range of biomedical applications of smart gels is reviewed and limits and perspectives of the proposed techniques a...

Nowadays advances in robotics and computer science have made possible the development of sociable and attractive robots. A challenging objective of the field of humanoid robotics is to make robots able to interact with people in a believable way. Recent studies have demonstrated that human-like robots with high similarity to human beings do not gen...

The family of ElectroActive Polymers for electromechanical transduction, better referred to as Electromechanically Active Polymers (EAPs), groups 'smart' materials that exhibit a mechanical response to an electrical stimulus, while offering, at the same time, light weight, mechanical compliance, compact size, simple structure, low power consumption...

The helical configuration represents one of the few currently available to implement contractile Dielectric Elastomer (DE) actuators. While experimental investigations have previously been reported, no model is currently available to assist design. This paper describes a simple analytical electromechanical model of helical DE actuators, applicable...

An ultra wideband (UWB) system-on-chip radar sensor for respiratory rate monitoring has been realized in 90 nm CMOS technology and characterized experimentally. The radar testchip has been applied to the contactless detection of the respiration activity of adult and baby. The field operational tests demonstrate that the UWB radar sensor detects the...

Optical lenses with tunable focus are needed in several fields of application, such as consumer electronics, medical diagnostics and optical communications. To address this need, lenses made of smart materials able to respond to mechanical, magnetic, optical, thermal, chemical, electrical or electrochemical stimuli are intensively studied. Here, we...

A bioinspired electrically tunable lens made of dielectric elastomer “artificial muscles” is presented by Carpi and coworkers on page 4152. The cover image shows a schematic sectional view of the all-polymer device, which is inspired by the architecture of the crystalline lens and ciliary muscle of the human eye. The background image is a detail of...

In this paper we propose a low-error approximation of the sigmoid function and hyperbolic tangent, which are mainly used to activate the artificial neuron, based on the piecewise linear method. Here, the hyperbolic tangent is alternatively approximated by exploiting its mathematical relationship with the sigmoid function, showing better results. Sp...

A novel method devoted to the reconstruction of the joint angles in a kinematic chain is described. The reconstruction algorithm is based on the fusion of the information deriving from inertial sensors (accelerometers) and conductive elastomer strain sensors. Accelerometers provide a reliable reconstruction when they are employed as inclinometers i...

People with ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorders) have difficulty in managing interpersonal relationships and common life social situations. A modular platform for Human Robot Interaction and Human Machine Interaction studies has been developed to manage and analyze therapeutic sessions in which subjects are driven by a psychologist through simulated soc...

Fully wearable and unobtrusive sensing will enable the possibility of monitoring people anywhere and anytime, for healthcare, well-being, protection and safety. Many research groups have exploited textiles as the ideal platform for pervasive monitoring. This paper reports advances in electroactive polymer technology oriented to mechanical sensing a...

Electro-activated actuators available today are still mainly based on metallic, stiff and heavy, parts (see for example electromagnetic motors). On the other hand, soft and light-weight electroactive polymers (EAPs) that are able to react to applied external electric fields with a change of size and/or shape are being developed. This kind of materi...

Learning to operate a vehicle is generally accomplished by forming a new cognitive map between the body motions and extrapersonal space. Here, we consider the challenge of remapping movement-to-space representations in survivors of spinal cord injury, for the control of powered wheelchairs. Our goal is to facilitate this remapping by developing int...

Background / Purpose: We present a simple model for the coupling of an astrocyte with one or more synapses with the aim to investigate the origins of the possible astrocyte dynamical responses. Main conclusion: We show that there are several parameters that could trigger the astrocyte from type-I-like excitability to a limit-cycle state. In pa...

There is a close correlation between stress and health risk factors such as poor immune function and cardio- vascular problems. Various researches showed that long-term exposure to stress and its related diseases are responsible of dramatic increase of mortality in the Western Countries. In this context, the European Collaborative Project INTERSTRE...

Dielectric elastomer actuators (DEAs) have been demonstrated to represent today a high-performance technology for electroactive polymer mechatronics. As a means to improve versatility and safety of DEAs, so-called “hydrostatically coupled” DEAs (HC-DEAs) have recently been shown to offer new opportunities. HC-DEAs are based on an incompressible flu...

As a means to improve versatility and safety of dielectric elastomer actuators (DEAs) for several fields of application, so-called 'hydrostatically coupled' DEAs (HC-DEAs) have recently been described. HC-DEAs are based on an incompressible fluid that mechanically couples a DE-based active part to a passive part interfaced to the load, so as to ena...

So-called 'hydrostatically coupled' dielectric elastomer actuators (HC-DEAs) have recently been shown to offer new opportunities for actuation devices made of electrically responsive elastomeric insulators. HC-DEAs include an incompressible fluid that mechanically couples a dielectric elastomer based active part to a passive part interfaced to the...

Experimental evidences on the role of the synaptic glia as an active partner together with the bold synapse in neuronal signaling and dynamics of neural tissue strongly suggest to investigate on a more realistic neuron-glia model for better understanding human brain processing. Among the glial cells, the astrocytes play a crucial role in the tripar...

Dielectric elastomer actuators (DEAs) have been demonstrated to represent today a high-performance technology for electromechanical transducers based on electroactive polymers. As a means to improve versatility and safety of DEAs for several fields of application, so-called ‘hydrostatically coupled’ DEAs (HC-DEAs) have recently been described. HC-D...

Buckling dielectric elastomer actuators are special type of electro-mechanical transducers that exploit electro-elastic instability phenomena to generate large out-of-plane axial-symmetric deformations of circular membranes made of non-conductive rubbery material. In this paper a simplified explicit analytical model and a monolithic finite element...

Personalized sensor networks optionally should include wearable sensors or a body area network (BAN) wirelessly connected to a home computer or a remote computer through long-distance devices, such as a personal digital assistant or a mobile phone. While long-distance data transmission can typically be performed only by using the batteries as a pow...

Reversible actuation strains in excess of 2% in the sheet direction and over 300% in the thickness direction have been produced by single wall carbon nanotube mats when electrochemically charged to +1.5V (vs. SCE) in aqueous sodium chloride solution. The observed strains represent a ten-fold increase over that previously reported for carbon nanotub...

In this chapter we present two innovative contributions derived by the System-on-Chip (SoC) approach combining standard microelectronic technologies with the life and geo-sciences. The former regards a SoC radar sensor for contactless cardiopulmonary monitoring. The latter focuses on a SoC radiometer for temperature remote sensing. For both micro-s...

Posture and motion of body segments are the result of a mutual interaction of several physiological systems such as nervous, muscle-skeletal, and sensorial. Patients who suffer from neuromuscular diseases have great difficulties in moving and walking, therefore motion or gait analysis are widely considered matter of investigation by the clinicians...

No abstract available

The idea that a solid material can deform when stimulated by electricity originated in the late-18th century with observations of ruptures in overcharged Leyden jars, the first electrical capacitors. In 1776, Italian scientist Alessandro Volta mentioned in a letter that Italian experimenter Felice Fontana had noted volume changes in the Leyden jar...

Stress and its related comorbid diseases are responsible for a large proportion of disability worldwide. In particular, chronic stress is the main responsible for the dramatic increase of premature mortality in the Western countries. However, advanced simulation and sensing technologies, such as virtual reality and mobile biosensors offer interesti...

Wearable sensors present a new frontier in the development of monitoring techniques. They are of great importance in sectors such as sport and healthcare as they enable physiological signals and biological fluids, such as human sweat, to be continuously monitored. Until recently this could only be carried out in specialized laboratories using cumbe...

Physical practice is known to enhance motor adaptation skills, which refer to the individual ability to compensate for environmental changes. So far, it is still unknown whether a similar effect can be observed following motor imagery (MI). Thirty-nine participants were tested during a joystick tracking task under both normal and mirror conditions...

People with autism are known to possess deficits in processing emotional states, both their own and of others. A humanoid robot, FACE (Facial Automation for Conveying Emotions), capable of expressing and conveying emotions and empathy has been constructed to enable autistic children and adults to better deal with emotional and expressive informatio...

The present study aimed to investigate whether an interference task might impact the sleep-dependent consolidation process of a mentally learned sequence of movements. Thirty-two participants were subjected to a first training session through motor imagery (MI) or physical practice (PP) of a finger sequence learning task. After 2h, half of the part...

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