Bleiz Del Sette

Profile

Project Title:

The Sound of Care: researching the use of deep learning and sonification for the daily support of people with Chronic Pain

Abstract:

The Sound of Care project will contribute to the emerging research on the use of sound interfaces for the rehabilitation and daily support of people with chronic pain, a condition that can severely impact a person's daily life and psychosocial wellbeing. Chronic pain affects an estimated amount of about 28 million individuals in the UK only, so the outcomes of this project will aim at consistently reducing the load on the UK NHS by enabling personalised and continuous support, and therefore decrease repeated use of primary and secondary healthcare services. This will improve the participants' ability to remain physically active, socially functional and capable to maintain their job. The proposed research will explore the potential of sonification in engaging and influencing both the motion and emotional components of body movement in the everyday physical functioning of people with chronic pain. I will investigate the possibilities of embodied characteristics of sound to directly alter movement behaviour, influencing the body perception and the psychological state of the individuals, and study the possible implementations of Deep Learning to detect the participants' emotional distress and contribute to the sound generation process. This project will be grounded in a user-centred approach, actively interacting with people with chronic pain and their emotional states, and augmenting their physical capabilities.

C4DM theme affiliation:

Communication Acoustics, Sonic Interaction Design, Music Cognition, Sound Synthesis

Research