Developping "Factories of the Future" implies to question work transformation and position of operators in their cooperation action with various technologies, such as cobots. The goal of this collaborative research project (PRC HECTTOR) - coupling ergonomics, sociology, anthropoly and process engineering - is to better understand technological, human and organizational issues of cobotization in small and medium-sized companies in France, with a prospective ambition. This focus on such companies is one of the originalities of our project, a second belongs to its origine as it is grounded in a COMUE HESAM initiative around "Factories of the Future" (the ECHINE project). To reach our objective, the project is structured around three tasks augmented by a valorization tasks. Anticipating and acting on the future implies to understand what is "already there" : the first three tasks deal with three complementary diagnosis (a social, political and technological diagonis, an organisational diagnosis and a diagnosis dealing with actual human-robot collaboration). These diagnosis will ground the construction of a prospective vision which concerns the development of management of transitions of work models. Impacts of the projects concern four main issues : • Political and social issues. Our work will help in understanding in an holistic and systemic manner health and safety, training and transition of work management in "Factories of the Future", feeding this way political and social questions. • Health and Safety, and training-skill management issues addressed through analysis of actual role of cobotization in relation to increasing/reducing of occupational health issues, training and enhancement of work. Indeed, introduction of cobots migth lead to enhance quality of work but can also lead to rigidification of work. • Transition in work management issues leading to the development of more sustainable work and more agile organization. Our work will help to understand and act on the position of operators and their work in evolution of organizations. In which way, transition in work management models : are they grounded in actual participation of humans in decision and design processes? do support the development of a qualitative work? do create sustainable work conditions ? • Technological issues related to possibilities of dynamic adaptation of design and production tools (e.g. simulation) and cobots to the diversity of situations that operators have to cope with, such as the evolutions of organizations. This implies to integrate human, health and safety, and organizational issues in early stages of design and transitions of work projects. Results of the project will be valorized by publications in each discipline, such as a common publication following a seminar. This seminar will help in targetting a more broad academic and industrial audience, in particular small and medium-size companies.

The major reason for the high rate of rejection of myoelectric prostheses after upper arm amputation is the unnatural control of the hand and wrist functions as well as the limited number of degrees of freedom (DoF) of the prosthesis. No solution has ever been proposed based on the natural neuromuscular reorganization after amputation leading to a mobile phantom limb in 77% of upper limb amputees. It had been shown that phantom movements are associated to specific activities of residual limb muscles according to the type of performed phantom movement. Interestingly, we found that neuromuscular reorganization gives rise to the genesis of functionally distinct muscle volumes within the same muscle, i.e., muscle volumes that are distinctly and independently active as function of the type of phantom movement. If we use these patterns of activation of the distinct muscle volumes to make the prosthesis mimicking the executed phantom movement, the control would be natural for the patients and the number of controllable active DoF of the prosthesis might potentially increase. So, the main goal of PhantoMovControl is to outreach the actual limits of myoelectric upper-arm prostheses by using high-resolution EMG associated with phantom movements, favouring a natural and intuitive control of prosthetic devices (thus without heavy training/learning) with a high number of DoF. Our main ambition is to develop within 3 years a “control kit” for existing polydigital hand prostheses and to rapidly transfer this approach to both clinic and to prosthesis industry. This control kit must integrate arrays of electrodes that can be placed on the residual limb within the socket of the prosthesis (thus ultra-thin, cable free, and fixed on an extensible support), as well as an embedded computer module that classifies muscle activity associated with phantom movements and controls in real time the polydigital prosthesis. Multi-electrode arrays are used in the literature and some are commercially available, but they do not fulfil our requirements. Therefore, we integrated an industrial partner able to design and produce such electrodes arrays to our academic consortium in order to accelerate the transfer of our new control approach to a concrete implementation by prosthetics companies in their products. In order to make our bio-inspired control approach robust and adaptable to intra- and inter-patient variability, we’ll have to progress in parallel at a fundamental level. We’ll study the neuromuscular reorganization after amputation and gather knowledge about the robustness of the EMG during different types of phantom movements (e.g., combined with residual limb movements, fast or slow…) and their evolution in time and following phantom movement training. Moreover, we’ll study the socio-anthropological and cultural phenomena influencing the appropriation of these technical objects in order to ease the appropriation by the patients of such myoelectric prostheses and reduce the rate of rejection of upper-limb prostheses. To ensure the multidisciplinarity of our approach, partners from Human and Social Sciences, Neurosciences and Engineering were gathered into the project. The consortium consists of 3 scientific (ISM, ISIR, CETCOPRA), 1 clinical (IRR) and 1 industrial partner (Microvitae), closely interacting in 5 Work Packages. Requested resources include an engineer to assist in the development of the EMG classifier and the “control kit” (ISIR), a postdoctoral researcher for studying the robustness of the EMG and its evolution after training (ISM), a prosthesist and an occupational therapist for adaptation of the prosthesis and its functional evaluation (IRR). We take up the challenge that this new control approach will function symbiotically with the underlying neuroplasticity, hereby stabilizing the control of the phantom movements and the associated EMG (and thus of the prosthesis) and increasing the appropriation by the patients of such technology.