Project description
How regenerative robotics can transform rehabilitation
Muscle damage, impacting essential functions like movement and respiration, poses a significant challenge. Recovery hinges on the interaction between the neuromuscular and immune systems. While inflammation is crucial initially to clear debris, its persistence can hinder neuromuscular recovery. The ERC-funded ROBOREACTOR project addresses this issue by revolutionising rehabilitation robotics. Unlike traditional robots that only offer immediate support, ROBOREACTOR controls muscle inflammation and remodelling over extended time periods. This project will develop robots to deliver electro-mechanical stimuli to human muscles and spinal neurons for weeks. By integrating biosignal processing and modelling, ROBOREACTOR aims to regenerate new healthy neuromuscular tissues after neuromuscular injuries. The project will demonstrate this technology in tissue-engineered human muscles in vitro and in stroke patients in vivo.
Objective
Muscle damage impairs vital functions e.g. movement, respiration. Recovery depends on the long-term interaction between neuromuscular and immune systems. If exposed to regimens of electro-mechanical stimuli, damaged muscles can remodel new structural properties over days. Inflammation at the damage site is initially needed to clear debris but if prolonged, as in many neuromuscular disorders, it may hamper structural remodeling.
Rehabilitation robots such as exoskeletons and neurostimulators can deliver tunable stimuli to muscles. However, although they can compensate for lack of e.g. muscle strength (within seconds), they cannot control for how muscles remodel across days. ROBOREACTOR shifts the paradigm, to control muscle key inflammation and remodeling factors over large time scales, where the knowledge gap is.
1) I will develop robots that deliver electro-mechanical stimuli to fibres and innervating spinal neurons in humans across weeks. By combining biosignal processing and modeling, I will predict how robot-stimuli influence key inflammation and remodeling processes in vivo, with cell-scale resolution.
2) I will engineer human tissues in vitro and develop robots that can expose tissues to the same stimuli experienced by muscles during robotic training in vivo. This will enable modeling subcellular inflammation and remodeling factors, with detail not attained in humans.
3) I will fit subcellular models in vitro and embed them in multi-scale models built in vivo. This will create new model-based controllers to demonstrate how robots optimize for inflammation to enhance, otherwise hampered remodeling. With a focus on neural and muscular dependences in post-stroke subjects, I propose muscle remodeling as a proxy for neuromuscular repair, a new concept in neurorobotics.
This opens to chronic robotic bioreactors, for maintenance of skeletal, cardiac, tubular organs; revisiting fundamental principles of human-robot interaction with broad impact on health.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
- engineering and technology environmental biotechnology bioremediation bioreactors
- medical and health sciences clinical medicine physiotherapy
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Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
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Topic(s)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
Funding Scheme
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC Grants
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Call for proposal
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Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
(opens in new window) ERC-2023-COG
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Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.
7522 NB Enschede
Netherlands
The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.