5 research outputs found
Implementation of new assistive technologies for people affected by Autistic Spectrum Disorders (ASDs)
Individuals with Autistic Spectrum Disorders (ASDs) have impairments in the processing of social and emotional information. The
number of children known to have autism has increased dramatically since the 1980s. This has sensitized the scientiÂŻc community to the
design and development of technologies suitable for treating an autistic patient in order to broaden the emotive responsiveness, such as
the employment of robotic systems to engage proactive interactive
responses in children with ASDs.
My PhD work focuses on the design and develop of new technologies
for therapy with individual affect by ASD. The main challenge of my
work has been to design and develop a novel control architecture able
to reproduce the brain characteristics in terms of high concurrency processing, flexibility and the ability to learn new behavior. The
main di±culties in implementing Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs)
in hardware in terms of accuracy, gate complexity and speed performance are discussed.
A new wearable eye tracking system able to investigate attention
disorders early in infancy is proposed. Technological choices are emphasized with respect to unobtrusive and ecological to adapt the
device for infants. New algorithms to increase the system robustness under illumination change and during calibration process have
been developed and herein presented. Experimental test prove the
effectiveness of the solutions.
Considerations on the future research directions are addressed, stressing the multiple application fields of the designed device
DeSyRe: on-Demand System Reliability
The DeSyRe project builds on-demand adaptive and reliable Systems-on-Chips (SoCs). As fabrication technology scales down, chips are becoming less reliable, thereby incurring increased power and performance costs for fault tolerance. To make matters worse, power density is becoming a significant limiting factor in SoC design, in general. In the face of such changes in the technological landscape, current solutions for fault tolerance are expected to introduce excessive overheads in future systems. Moreover, attempting to design and manufacture a totally defect and fault-free system, would impact heavily, even prohibitively, the design, manufacturing, and testing costs, as well as the system performance and power consumption. In this context, DeSyRe delivers a new generation of systems that are reliable by design at well-balanced power, performance, and design costs. In our attempt to reduce the overheads of fault-tolerance, only a small fraction of the chip is built to be fault-free. This fault-free part is then employed to manage the remaining fault-prone resources of the SoC. The DeSyRe framework is applied to two medical systems with high safety requirements (measured using the IEC 61508 functional safety standard) and tight power and performance constraints
EARLY EVALUATION OF THE CONNECTIONS BETWEEN AUTISM AND ALTERATIONS OF MOVEMENT
Several anomalies in autistic children
appearing as clear and permanent movement alterations such as
deficiency in coordination, head bending, tiptoe walking, hand
gesture and body rocking under the legs, or of the upper body,
accompanied by frequent falls. The aim of this work will be to
monitor the movement alterations jointly to vital signs in order to
investigate the connections between movement disturbances and
autism. In particular, this paper would monitor body posture, head
bending, hand gesture and vital signs from groups of normal and
autistic children in a controlled environment, for making diagnosis
and monitoring trend of the therapy
Anatomia del corpo, anatomia dell'anima
Questo volume nasce da due giornate di studio previste all’interno
del progetto finanziato dal CNR sul tema: 'Dalla filosofia
moderna alle neuroscienze. Nuove frontiere di ricerca e di discussione
interdisciplinare: il ruolo delle emozioni nei processi cognitivi,
l’interpretazione processuale della coscienza e le possibilitĂ
di una neuroetica'