• The researchers Isabel Tuñas Maceiras, with the talk «Technology with a human touch: the key role of physiotherapy» and Ana Xiangning Pereira Ezquerro, speaking about «Linking Emotions in Multimodal Inputs», were responsible for opening this cycle of meetings.

The cycle of meetings aimed at researchers in the early stages of their careers started today at CITIC of UDC, discussing ICT and health. Specifically, the importance of ICT in physiotherapy applied to the study of chronic neck pain.

Isabel Tuñas presented the key points of her doctoral thesis project, which is based on the study of chronic neck pain, as a continuation of the foundations laid in her undergraduate and master’s final projects. In her work, she tries to combine physiotherapy with technology to detect patterns or ways to correct posture and eliminate or reduce pain. The study is intended to be carried out in two phases. The first phase will consist of tests such as sitting, walking, or lifting a weight with the Optitrack system, so that it records the derived data such as the time it takes to perform the movement, the initial and final postures… The second phase would be developed in an immersive virtual reality system, consisting of an adapted environment where actions like those described in phase one can be performed and see how the movement could be improved.

Ana Ezquerro presented her developing model that seeks to identify emotions using multimodal inputs, integrating text, video, and audio. The model focuses on graph prediction, with the aim of determining whether a specific fragment of a scene influences the emotion generated in a subsequent scene. In the presentation, she explained how these models work conceptually and visually. Additionally, preliminary results were shown that highlight the inherent complexity and subjectivity of these tasks, suggesting various possibilities for future research in this field.

The TIC Talk Breakfasts are held monthly and aim to enhance cross-disciplinary collaboration and promote potential collaborations and synergies among researchers.