Augmenting a product means adding features at its core or at its additional functionalities. In the context of sport technology, the goal of augmented products is to monitor and thus enhance over time the athlete\u2019s performance, to reduce the risk of injury and increase the overall engagement for young and disabled people. In parallel, within the context of workplace safety and ergonomics, augmented products aim at improving workers\u2019 safety and health, with the results of enhancing the overall workers wellbeing and reducing the risk of injury. Furthermore, the implementation of such devices can be also used as a tool to improve work performances of people with disabilities. Today, we are far from completely sustainable and recyclable products. This is mainly due to materials and lack of smartness for supporting the users during multiple life cycles.
The goal of the AURORA project is to develop sustainable augmented products for sports and safety based on four main pillars: i) sustainable product design: activities to improve products and their life cycle in terms of required materials and components, as well as opportunities for maintenance and repair; ii) sustainable smart materials, in terms of smart textile and foam easy to recycle and reuse; iii) sustainable functionalities: additional IoT functionalities focused on the optimization of product use and sustainable maintenance to extend its lifetime; iv) sustainable impact on the society: analysis of the costs in terms of social aspects and legislative implications (especially about safety in and outside the work environment). Potential improvements can be attained also in the aspect of mass product personalization, by developing human-centric devices taking into account the morphologic measures of human beings.
In order to achieve the proposed aims a multidisciplinary team has been composed with expertise in the following fields: product design and development methods, sports engineering, soft robotics, wearable sensors, chemical sensors for smart textiles, processes and recycling technologies for textiles, artificial intelligence to design fabric structure, electronic instrumentation and sensors, non-invasive control and non-destructive diagnostic material characterization, statistical methods for controlling and improving the quality process, social network analysis, labour law.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"parent":0,"template":"","class_list":["post-1869","projects","type-projects","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n