NEXT GENERATION EU
KEY ENABLING TECHNOLOGIES

ACTIVE: the digital app for personalised coaching

Yesterday in the morning, at the Lecco Campus, the ACTIVE App was presented. It is a personalised coaching application created as part of ActivE³ – Everyone, Everywhere, Everyday, a Major Emblematic Project funded by Fondazione Cariplo and Regione Lombardia that aims at promoting an active lifestyle through the use of technology. The app is the result of the work of the researchers of Sensibilab – Laboratory for Sensors and Biomedical Systems at the Lecco Campus, ASST Lecco, ATS Brianza and Villa Beretta – Presidio di Riabilitazione dell’Ospedale Valduce.

The app has a dual function: for the user, it is a digital personalised training guide that includes health tips; for researchers and health professionals, it is a useful data platform to check the effectiveness of this tool in improving/maintaining well-being and for designing new prevention initiatives aimed at the community.

We are approaching the new era of digital therapies. Today, as part of the Active3 project, we start experimenting a prevention service based on an App aimed to promote and monitor active and nutritionally balanced lifestyles for the over-60 population.

A clinical trial phase will now start, involving 200 healthy individuals in the 60-80 age group for the next 18 months. The trial will be validated by a screening of the participants’ health status and will include cognitive questionnaires on health status and nutrition and motor, psychometric and neuro-psychological tests as well as blood samples, which will be used to assess the effects of using the app on the participants’ overall health. The ACTIVE app will act as a motivational tool to encourage more static participants to get active and to stimulate those already active to maintain a healthy lifestyle by providing feedback on their activity and personalised hints.

Thanks to Fondazione Cariplo, Regione Lombardia and the network of technological and clinical partners, we are developing an integrated system in the local area that we hope will be used and disseminated after the end of the project in favour of a real 5P medicine (Preventive, Predictive, Participative, Personalised and Psychosocial) of the future. 

Prof. Giuseppe Andreoni, scientific coordinator of the Sensibilab laboratory,

Optical wireless: the new frontier for communication

In the field of cable transmission, the advent of optical fibres represented an epochal technological leap, allowing light to be used to transfer enormous amounts of data, and they now form the basic infrastructure of the Internet and global telecommunications systems.

For wireless communications too, it is expected that optical connections will soon represent the new frontier. Similarly to what happens in optical fibres, even in free space, light can travel in the form of beams having different shapes, called “modes”, and each of these modes can carry a flow of information. Generating, manipulating and receiving more modes therefore means transmitting more information. The problem is that free space is a much more hostile, variable and unpredictable environment for light than an optical fibre. Obstacles, atmospheric agents or more simply the wind encountered along the way, can alter the shape of the light beams, mix them and make them at first sight unrecognisable and unusable.    

A study by the Politecnico di Milano, conducted together with Stanford University, the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna in Pisa and the University of Glasgow and published in the prestigious journal Light: Science & Applications, has found a way to separate and distinguish optical beams even if they are superimposed and the form in which they arrive at their destination is drastically changed and unknown.

This operation is made possible by a programmable photonic processor built on a silicon chip of just 5 mm2. The processor created is able to receive all the optical beams through a multitude of microscopic optical antennas integrated on the chip, to manipulate them through a network of integrated interferometers and to separate them on distinct optical fibres, eliminating mutual interference. This device allows information quantities of over 5,000 Ghz to be managed, at least 100 times greater than current high-capacity wireless systems.

The activity is funded by the European Horizon 2020 Superpixels project, which aims to create next-generation sensor and imaging systems by exploiting the on-chip manipulation of light signals

The studio is authored among the others by Francesco Morichetti, head of the Photonic Devices Lab and Andrea Melloni, director of Polifab, the Politecnico di Milano centre for micro and nanotechnologies.

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