Presentation - Wearable robots for sustainable aging

Exoskeletons have been proposed mostly as tools to enhance the rehabilitation and post-rehabilitation phases of patients with motor disabilities due to stroke or other neurological conditions. As a further application, exoskeletons may have the potential to elicit “pre-habilitative” effects in the elderly, namely, they could be used as training tools for regular physical activity thanks to a variety of training paradigms, including for example, training at higher velocities, volumes, or workloads without significantly increasing the metabolic consumption of the user. In my talk, I will give an overview of the pre-habilitative and rehabilitative potentials of lower-limb exoskeletons based on the experience of the wearable robotics laboratory of The BioRobotics Institute of Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna.

Biography

Simona Crea is a tenure-track Assistant Professor at Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna (SSSA). Her background is in Biomedical Engineering and her research experience is in the field of wearable robotics for rehabilitation, assistance, and augmentation of human motor functions. Currently, she co-leads the wearable robotics laboratory of Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna and she is the scientific coordinator and PI for SSSA of different national and international projects. She serves as an Associate Editor for Transactions on Robotics (IEEE), Robotics and Automation Letters (IEEE), and Wearable Technologies (Cambridge University Press). In 2023 she joined the board of the International Consortium for Rehabilitation Robotics (ICORR) as secretary. She is also a shareholder and scientific advisor for IUVO S.r.l., a spin-off company of SSSA that aims to commercialize wearable robots in the healthcare, industry, and personal care sectors.