Life Cycle Thinking

design for a new strategy of incremental, sustainable and integrated deep renovation of buildings to be adopted in the construction sector

Company: Fratus Restauri srl - Benis Costruzioni srl – Arpostudio srl

Tutor: Alessandra Marini

In the first phase, starting from an analysis of the European directives and the main environmental sustainability standards for the construction sector, this project will analyze the most widespread energy/seismic requalification solutions, identifying their strengths and weaknesses and also considering the innovative solutions proposed in the rest of Europe.

In the second phase, the focus will be on the study of a ‘standardizable’ and optimized solution in terms of costs and times for selected residential construction types, widespread throughout the country, focusing on design according to the principles of Life Cycle Thinking for maximizing energy, functional and structural performances, while minimizing costs and impacts on the life cycle of a building.

The third phase of the research project will develop a technical-financial analysis of the incremental integrated redevelopment model applied to the standardized solution identified in the previous phase.

The analysis will focus on the identification of financing incentives and on the economic return of the retrofit intervention, with the conceptual design of an intervention protocol.

Develop Data Analysis pipelines that, starting from wearable sensors and other variables, are able to assess physical and cognitive effort of the workers

Company: Consorzio Intellimech

Tutor: Fabio Previdi

The debate on the role of people in factories is increasingly making it urgent to study models that place people in a position to do their job better with a centric role in the evolution of production processes, also introducing systems that exploit Artificial Intelligence (AI) considering the diversity of the cognitive and physical abilities of the workers involved.

Among the most relevant challenges is the creation of safe and comfortable workplaces capable of reducing the physical and cognitive effort of the workers.

A recent internal survey showed a strong interest among companies in the field of safety for both their operators within production facilities (user perspective) and users during interaction with the produced machines and the tools (vendor perspective).

More than 50% of the companies would be interested in adopting an innovative technological solution able to reduce the number of accidents and increase the safety of people.

The project aims to develop and deploy dynamic human-machine interaction systems, ranging from adaptive control logics to the simple monitoring of working conditions.

The envisaged objective will be reached by integrating real-time data collected thorough various enriched and enhanced wearable devices and persistent data (age, skill, environment, etc.) to achieve information concerning physical, sensing and cognitive humans‘ capabilities.

Despite recent developments and efforts in the field, the solutions still lack a holistic approach capable of considering multiple variables from both the point of view of sensors (number of variables collected and usable within AI models) and the physical and psychological characteristics as well as attitudes of people.

The starting point for this investigation will be a literature analysis to identify the most promising signals and devices worth being integrated to achieve the envisaged holistic solution.

These tangible specific objectives are to be achieved during the development of the project:

• Based on the literature, identify the most interesting physiological signals to create an over-sensorized system. Signals may include: facial movements, brain activity, breath activity, cardiovascular activity, and body movements.

• Starting from the over-sensorized system, apply dimensionality reduction algorithms to identify the minimum subset of sensors maximizing the information content.

• Use the minimum subset to develop Data Analysis Pipelines able to assess the physical and cognitive state of the workers that are wearing the devices.

Study, development and characterization of noninvasive wearable devices for real-time monitoring of physiological signals

Company: Consorzio Intellimech

Tutor: Giuseppe Rosace

Intellimech is a no-profit private research consortium founded in Bergamo in 2007 to fill the gap between the research and the industrial sector, promoting the collaboration of companies of different sizes and from various industrial domains.

The project seeks to create safe and comfortable workplaces capable of reducing workers’ physical and cognitive effort relying on new-generation devices, integrating the opportunities deriving from new technological developments in the wearable and healthcare consumer fields.

To achieve this purpose, it will be necessary to develop and deploy a system able to create new human-machine dynamic interactions with human physical and cognitive capabilities through various enriched and enhanced wearable devices technologies.

The ambition of the project is, therefore, to overcome current research in this field by integrating their principles and results with the opportunities deriving from new technological developments in the wearable and healthcare fields.

The project satisfies the crucial requirements to support the development of stimuli-responsive fabrics, aiming to create wearable sensors.

Furthermore, thanks to the flexibility and lightness of the selected substrate, the properties of the advanced coating, without forgetting the efficiency of the applications in perspective of the desirable industrial scale-up, the project will make it possible to increase current scientific knowledge, introducing advanced solutions concerning the technologies currently used in the field of sensors.