Project description
Artificial intelligence to help patients with prosthetics
Millions of people worldwide suffer from deteriorated motor abilities resulting from strokes, brain tumour surgery or accidents. In most cases, prosthetic and assistive devices are the only option. The EU-funded MAIA project is taking one step further by designing a human-centric artificial intelligence (AI) to control prosthetic and assistive devices fitting on robotic arms, wheelchairs and exoskeletons. MAIA technology will be interactive, encouraging the confrontation between AI decision, user intention and real needs. Natural and fast communication as well as new forms of neural and behavioural data combinations will be identified, moving beyond current data processing methods. Such principles will be the core idea around which the MAIA ecosystem will be developed, laying the foundations for biomedical human centric AI.
Objective
What if in a near future Artificial Intelligence (AI) becomes human-centric, focusing on human needs and build trustworthiness by mutual understanding? Today, millions of people worldwide suffer from deteriorated motor abilities, due to stroke, brain tumor surgery or accident. This represents a serious society challenge with missing adequate technological response. Patients need assistive devices that are trustworthy, multifunctional, adaptive and interactive, i.e. intelligent, unlike current neuroprosthetics that replace single motor impairments.
MAIA proposes a paradigm shift where human-centric AI will control prosthetic and assistive devices. We will investigate and resolve critical steps towards the rapid development of such human-centric control: a radically novel intention decoder, a novel concept for trustworthy human-AI interactions, and a new type of database for acquired information from multiple sources.
MAIA AI technology will decode human intentions and communicate the decoded targets to assistive devices and to the users, to ensure compliance and develop trust through natural interaction and mutual learning. The technological outcome will be a multifunctional human-centric AI controller at TRL4 with embedded trustworthy characteristics, suitable to be integrated in robotic arms, wheelchair and exoskeletons.
To reach this, MAIA will investigate the principles underlying natural, fast and lean communication and new forms of combinations of neural and behavioural data beyond current data processing. MAIA’s approach will be guided by real needs of end users (patients and caregivers) through their direct involvement in the research program, and by all current knowledge from neuro-, cognitive, and social science research.
The application domains of MAIA’s new paradigm span from healthcare to industry, and space exploration. We will also establish a European innovation ecosystem beyond the research labs that will stimulate highly innovative enterprises.
Fields of science
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
Keywords
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
RIA - Research and Innovation actionCoordinator
40126 Bologna
Italy