In December 2019, the College of Rehabilitation Sciences welcomed two engineering professors from France to discuss advancements in smart home solutions, artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, haptics and virtual reality (VR) for health care.
“Winnipeg is a winter city, so a good place for ideation about winter-related technologies to support health care and services in the Nordics,” said Dr. Amine Choukou, assistant professor in the department of occupational therapy.
Eric Monacelli, professor at the University of Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines (LISV lab – UVSQ – Paris Saclay University) in France, and Patrick Henaff, professor in the Mines Nancy school of engineering at the University of Lorraine spent few days discussing opportunities for international and multidisciplinary collaborations.
Monacelli specializes in interactive and assistive robotics and how this technology can be used for wheelchair mobility training. A system he developed, called Virtual Fauteuil (VF), uses a robotic platform and virtual reality to simulate driving a wheelchair in realistic environments. The system, which can accommodate manual or motorized wheelchairs, is already being tested in Quebec and France.
Choukou sees an opportunity to bring this project to Manitoba, where an adaptation of a winter-specific version of the program and evaluation is under consideration.
“When you use a wheelchair for the first time in your life, you need to be trained, but the current training in institutions is very basic and unspecific,” Choukou said. Once fully developed, he said, the VF system can show users how to navigate through ice and snow in different modalities before they experience the real thing.
The VF platform will be added to the Winter Wheeled Mobility research group led by Dr. Jacquie Ripat, associate professor in the department of occupational therapy.
Henaff’s research interests lie in the bio-inspired control of humanoid robots. He is the head of the AI, complex systems and robotics research department at the Loria lab of the University of Lorraine. Last year, two of his engineering students attended the College of Rehabilitation Sciences to work with Choukou on his project at Riverview Health Centre developing a system to alert the dementia unit staff to dangerous situations relying on a set of 3D depth cameras that monitor the residents’ navigation without breaching their privacy.
“One of the goals of this visit was to foster student exchanges,” Choukou said. “I hope to see more of professor Henaff’s students in my lab this summer, and if some of our students want to be trained in France, we want also to encourage and support that exchange.”
These topics will be further explored at the Augmented Human International Conference, May 27 – 29 at the University of Manitoba Fort Garry campus. Choukou is global co-chair of the conference, along with Redha Taiar from the University of Reims Champagne-Ardenne in France. The event, in its 11th year, is being held in Canada for the first time.