Information and Communication Technologies

The overall activity in this pillar is focused on the development of innovative devices, instrumentation, algorithms, models and strategies for the investigation of physiological systems and pathological conditions.

Human Machine Interface

The interaction between living systems and electronic devices is exploited in a wide number of applications, ranging from the study of cell cultures by means of micro/nano-systems (nano-scale), to the functional study of specific systems (system-scale) by in-vivo acquired data, and to the development of rehabilitation architectures and protocols (application-scale). As an example, most of the clinical diagnosis processes heavily rely on data acquired by interfacing patients with different devices. Being the interfacing with living systems a multi-scale and complex problem, the research in this field benefits from a multi-disciplinary and integrative approach.

The challenge to be faced in this track is the integration of different technologies for the improvement of the devices, techniques, and application needed when interfacing with living systems and humans is required. 

Oncology

Cancer poses three main challenges: 1) it is growing worldwide as number of new cases per year, even though the patients’ survival (for many types of cancer) is improving; 2) most of the mechanisms underlying cancer biology are still not fully known; 3) survival is often correlated to early diagnosis. Being cancer patients also an economic problem, it is important to improve the knowledge about the mechanisms underlying cancer development, as well as to improve the diagnostic tools.

Specifically, the fields of application are 1) breast cancer; 2) prostate cancer; and 3) cancer fatigue

Ageing and Fragility

Ageing is a process leading to overt changes in physiological systems. Often, elderly people become fragile from different points of view: cardiovascular, skeletal, neurological, muscular, metabolic, and so on. There are a lot of pathologies for which age represents the primary risk factor; as an example: stroke and cardiovascular accidents, some types of cancer, and some metabolic syndromes.

Active ageing is nowadays a hot research topic. The objective is to keep the elderly people as healthy as possible and, finally, to prevent them from becoming fragile. If there is a good number of elderly people that cannot be considered as fragile, there are other groups of subjects that show fragility even before becoming elderly. Therefore, this line of activity will be devoted to the study of physiological ageing as well as to the development of solutions for human fragility.