Ponte, Serena |Italy

Serena Ponte was born in Genoa, Italy, on May 19, 1990. She obtained the "Laurea" degree (BSc) in September 2012 and the "Laurea Magistrale" degree (MSc) in October 2014 both in Biomedical Engineering at University of Genoa. She developed her Master thesis on “Biofeedback methods for monitoring patients during rehabilitation at home” at NUMIP with the Signal & Image Processing group at DITEN (Department of Naval Electrical Electronical and Telecommunication Engineering). Since November 2014, she is a Ph.D. student in Science and Technology for Electronic and Telecommunications Engineering: her research topics focus on biofeedback methods for the analysis of biomedical signals and images for monitoring and follow up. In particular, she studies the heartbeat during a rehabilitation program for patients with cognitive problems that lead to motor disabilities of the upper limb. She is also IEEE Student Member associated to IEEE Signal Processing Society.

Project at IAS-STS: Evaluation of the approach to rehabilitative technology in elderlies: a gender study

Human engagement and emotions during therapy can be expressed through many channels such as facial expressions, voice, but also physiological responses like accelerations and decelerations of the heartbeat. For this reason, with literature references, the heart rate (HR) was chosen as a physiological signal to analyse and monitor relevant changes during different phases of a rehabilitation session. From literature, it appears to be a good indicator of emotional involvement. Then by subjecting both genders to a protocol that provides a resting phase alternated to a game phase, they can be extracted parameters useful for evaluation of the differences between males and females. Another topic would be if heart rate is more significant in males or females as an involvement parameter. The study will be conducted using several types of elaborations and interpretation of the heartbeat signal in time and frequency domain. Combining the different information extracted for all elaborations, the aim is to understand if through the heart rate is possible to have information of user involvement and of interactions between human and Technology.

Publications and conferences

E. Ferrara, S.Nardotto, S.Ponte, SG. Dellepiane. (2014) Infrastructure for data management and user centered rehabilitation in Rehab@Home project. PETRA'14, May 27-30, 2014, Island of Rhodes, Greece. ISBN: 978-1-4503-2746-6 doi>10.1145/2674396.2674419

Accepted: S. Ponte, E. Ferrara, SG. Dellepiane. Home-based system for rehabilitation: improving quality of life through engineering solutions, Engineering 4 Society, Raising awareness for the societal and environmental role of engineering and (re)training engineers for participatory design. IEEE Conference June 18 and 19, 2015 Leuven, Belgium.