Seminar: Neuromorphic Engineering for Bioelectronic Medicine, Dr Elisa Donati from ETH Zurich

Abstract: Neuromorphic processors comprise hybrid analog/digital circuits that implement hardware models of biological systems, using computational principles analogous to the ones used by the nervous systems. The neuromorphic devices exhibit very slow, biologically plausible, time constants to well match the signals they are designed to process, such that they are inherently synchronized with the real-world signals they sense and act on. This leads to the advantage of ultra-low power processing of natural sensory signals, which is particularly important in biomedical and prosthetic applications. In addition, neuromorphic technology offers the possibility to process the data directly on the sensor side, at the "edge", in real-time, making them ideal for wearable solutions.
In this presentation, a general concept of neuromorphic engineering is introduced, together with some practical use cases.

Bio: Elisa Donati received the B.Sc, MSc degree in Biomedical Engineering from the University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy, and the Ph.D. degree in BioRobotics from the Sant'Anna School of Advanced Studies, Pisa, Italy in 2016. Currently, she is a Senior Scientist at the Institute of Neuroinformatics, and a member of the ZNZ Center, at the University of Zurich and ETHZ. Her research interests include how to interface neurorobotics and neuromorphic engineering for building smart and wearable biomedical devices. In particular, she is interested in designing VLSI systems for prosthetic devices. She is investigating how to process EMG data to extract features to produce motor commands by using spiking neural networks. Another recent application includes building bioelectronic devices using neuromorphic technology for neurostimulation. Dr. Donati serves as an associate editor of Frontiers in Neuromorphic Engineering and she is a TC member of Neural Systems and Applications of the circuit and system society and the Biomedical circuit and system society.