Thanks to the generous support of its founding institutions, The Sense Innovation and Research Center is proud to support four research projects in its inaugural 2022 call that aims to provide a better understanding of and better solutions for sensory health.
The call for proposals required applicants to work across the CHUV–UNIL and HES-SO Valais-Wallis and to formulate projects with the potential for yielding concrete results within a year’s time. Proposals were evaluated by The Sense’s external Scientific Advisory Board, who provided their report to The Sense’s Council for validation.
Brain-TRACE
Brain-based Test of Refraction and Acuity Correction of the Eye
Olivier Collignon (HES-SO Valais-Wallis), Micah Murray (CHUV-UNIL)
Imagine yourself squinting and seeing blurry images. With each lens change that your eye doctor makes, you reply “better” or “worse”. After a while, your impression is that everything looks similar. Now imagine your 5-year-old child completing this eye exam because their schoolwork is suffering. Determining the precise refractive error and optimal correction for a given individual remains highly subjective and error-prone, especially for children. Brain-TRACE addresses the pandemic of myopia that will affect 50% of the global population by 2050.
Dream Detector
Developing a real-time dream detector
Francesca Siclari (CHUV-UNIL), Henning Müller (HES-SO Valais-Wallis), Martin Jaggi (EPFL)
Although most dreams are rapidly forgotten and hardly ever represent a problem, for 5-10% of the population, they can become a real burden. Dream Detector combines EEG with artificial intelligence techniques to predict dreaming in real time, while subjects are sleeping.
ARBORELE
Age-related effect of metric body representation of lower extremities for walking
Lara de Preux Allet (HES-SO Valais-Wallis), Julien Favre (CHUV-UNIL), Michela Bassolino (HES-SO Valais-Wallis)
The perception of the dimension of body parts is considered essential to perform efficient and safe movements: for instance, we need to know the length of our arm to properly reach an object. ARBORELE compares the perception of the lower extremity between young and older adults and characterizes its relationship with walking. A better understanding of lower extremity perception can provide major applications in walking impairments and sport training across the lifespan.
Attentive Slippers
Development of instrumented footwear to monitor gait at home or during a clinical stay
Julien Favre (CHUV-UNIL), Henning Müller (HES-SO Valais-Wallis), Lara de Preux Allet (HES-SO Valais-Wallis)
Surprisingly, although walking is essential for human beings and involved in numerous pathologies, there is a lack of method to monitor gait continuously at home or during a clinical stay. This project proposes to instrument slippers and design algorithms to extract important biomechanical measures during activities of daily living.