GA no. 899626
Funding programme/Agency: Horizon 2020
Acronym: NIMA
Institution: Imperial College London
Project type: RIA – Research and Innovation action
Implementation period: 01.10.2020 – 31.03.2024
Budget: €3,076,488.75
Project website:
PROJECT SUMMARY:
The NIMA project advanced a novel approach to leverage motor system redundancy for controlling additional artificial limbs, devices, or computers independently of natural limb movements. Aiming to expand human capabilities through movement augmentation, the project explored new frontiers in assistive technologies and human–machine interaction.
A multidisciplinary team of experts in neuroscience, neurotechnology, human–machine interfaces, robotics, and ethics worked toward creating non-invasive interfaces with multimodal sensory feedback, investigating the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying movement augmentation, and addressing the ethical and safety implications of these technologies.
Each institution led a specific research area: Freiburg focused on muscle and wearable interfaces, Imperial College London on neural interfaces, and Sorbonne University on body interfaces. Imperial developed real-time algorithms to extract motor unit activity from high-density EMG recordings involving over 100 electrodes in dynamic, non-stationary conditions. Unlike traditional offline methods requiring extensive calibration, their adaptive algorithms continuously adjusted to signal changes, enabling stable, real-time neural tracking. We introduced a method to update separation vectors in blind-source separation to accommodate shifts in neural sources.
Project Coordinator:
Name and surname: Dario Farina
Email: d.farina@imperial.ac.uk
Personal Profile: Profile – Dario Farina