Prof. Lorenzo Masia

Soft wearable exosuits have been introduced in the last decade as possible candidates to overcome the limitations from devices using rigid structures: the exoskeletons.

Despite the Exosuits initially promised tangible improvements, yet their soft wearable architecture presents strong drawbacks, placing this technology more in a complementary position rather than on a higher step of the podium respect to their predecessors.

Motivations can be found in their soft structure which not only undershoots in terms of assistance delivery respect to the exoskeletons, but also introduces non-linear dynamic behaviours making difficult the formalization of a robust control implementation and substantially hampering the matching with the wearer´s biomechanics.

During my speech I will introduce the progress from our research on soft wearable exosuits for upper and lower limb, by presenting novel solutions on mechanical design of both harness and actuation, novel implementation of control strategies to master the non-linear behaviours.  I will discuss in details how using biosignals by means of a realtime myoprocessor based on musculoskeletal dynamics which provide a symbiotic interface between the exosuit and the user and compared such a solution with a classical approach based on admittance control. I will introduce our novel solutions in lower limb assistive devices using non-linear adaptive oscillators and machine learning.

Biography:

Lorenzo Masia graduated in Mechanical Engineering at “Sapienza” University of Rome in 2003 and in 2007 He accomplished his PhD in “Mechanical Measurement for Engineering” at the University of Padua. He started his path in robotics spending two years at the Mechanical Engineering Dept. of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) (from Jan- 2005 to Dec 2006) working at the Newman Lab for Biomechanics and Human Rehabilitation.
He was then postdoctoral researcher at the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT) in the Robotics Brain and Cognitive Sciences Department and He started his academic path as Assistant Professor at the School of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering (MAE) at Nanyang Technological University (NTU) of Singapore (2013-2018). He was Associate Professor in Biodesign at the Department of Biomechanical Engineering of the University of Twente (The Netherlands) from June 2018 to March 2019. Now, since April 2019, He is Full Professor in Medical Technology at Heidelberg University (Germany) at the Institute of Computer Engineering or Institut für Technische Informatik (ZITI), leading the ARIES Lab (Assistive Robotics and Interactive ExoSuits). 

Prof Masia was awarded multiple times in the leading conferences in Biorobotics and Robotic Rehabilitation winning two IEEE Best Student Paper Awards (IEEE ICORR2015 and IEEE Biorob2016), one IEEE Best Paper Award (IEEE ICORR2011), and finalists of "Best Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) Paper Award" at IEEE ICRA 2017. He has been appointed three times Program Chair for the IEEE International Conference in Rehabilitation Robotics (ICORR) 2015, IEEE Biorobotics and Biomechatronic Conference (BIOROB) 2016 and International Conference on Neurorehabilitation (ICNR 2018).He served as Chairman for Workshop/Tutorial for the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (IEEE ICRA 2017), and He was the Co-Program Chair of IEEE ICORR 2017 (London, UK), and Co-Program Chair, Editor in Chief and Editor of Publication for IEEE Biorob 2018. Lorenzo Masia serves as Associate Editor for IEEE RAL Robotics and Automation Letters (2019-present), IEEE Transaction on Neural Systems and Rehabilitation Engineering (2019-present), Journal of NeuroEngineering and Rehabilitation (2019-present) and Wearable Technologies, Cambridge Press (2021-present).

Address:Italy