The Polimi FES-Bike Team will participate in the international Cybathlon 2024 competition, which will be held Oct. 25-27. Specifically, the team will compete in the FES-Bike (Functional Electrical Stimulation Bike) discipline, in which a pilot with complete paraplegia pedals autonomously through the use of surface neuromuscular electrical stimulation.

The team was established in 2019 at NEARLab by a group of researchers and students coordinated by Emilia Ambrosini from the Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering, who began designing the first Functional Electrical Stimulation Bike prototype at Politecnico di Milano. Since then, the group has expanded and continued to work on improving the device and its performance. In particular, the addition of new sensors to improve the control system and the study of different stimulation strategies are two of the main innovations introduced by the Polimi team to address the upcoming competition.

Cybathlon is a unique competition in which people with disabilities tackle various daily activities with state-of-the-art assistive technologies. It is organized every year by the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH) Zürich.