RePliCA project is dedicated to children suffering from cerebral palsy (CP). Cerebral palsy is the first cause of motor troubles in children. Its incidence is around 1500 new subjects per year in France. Among the numerous potential motor troubles of CP children, we will focus on facial dyspraxia. This dyspraxia that can be very severe for some children can bring several consequences on different levels. It is partly due to the difficulty that those children encounter to avoid coupling when controlling muscles close one to the others but also because this control is often done following an “all-or-nothing” scheme. In addition to the problems of oral communication, the troubles that can appear most usually are difficulties for feeding as it necessitates a good coordination of chewing and facial muscles. CP children have unfortunately a lack of such coordination. Our approach is to develop a new rehabilitation technique based on the reproduction of movement to generate phonemes. To do this, we use the interaction with an avatar animated from the child’s own motions. Indeed, the classical technique for facial motion rehabilitation is to ask the child to reproduce a gesture previously performed by the therapist. This is based on the hypothesis that the child is able to compare his own motion and the therapist’s one. It thus admits that the child is able to convert these two motions into a similar representation in a common mental space. This hypothesis seems to be too strong for children having a too severe affection. The principle of the new rehabilitation tool we wish to develop in RePliCA project is to simplify this process of praxias comparison. It is based on the mirror neurons concept developed in the team of Rizzolatti and Fadiga. This theory stipulates that observing a motion activates neurons that are common with those that allow to perform the same motion. The principle of our tool is that during a rehabilitation session the child will observe simultaneously on the same screen an avatar, the virtual therapist’s one, performing the gesture to be done, and a second avatar animated from the motion he actually performs. To avoid the use of a too complex motion capture system, the child will be filmed by a simple video camera. A first technical challenge is thus to perform markerless facial motion capture. A major challenge of the project deals with the ability of CP children to identify themselves with their avatar such that they can have the visual feedback needed for the exercise of motor control proposed by the therapist. We will thus study the influence of the different parameters needed to design the avatar (age, appearance, etc.) on this ability. This new technique will be experimented during the RePLICA project on a group of CP children. A first evaluation criterion will be the attention and implication ability of the children within an interactive rehabilitation session. A connate goal is thus to design a new metric based of facial motion to provide him a feedback within this session and also to evaluate the progress of children along a rehab program. Even if we focus on speech rehabilitation, the goal is indeed larger. We hypothesize that, if the rehab process we propose has positive impact, it will not only on speech production but also in other facial functions, and among them, feeding.

HoBiS is a pluridisciplinary research project, fundamental in nature and centred on palaeoanthropological questions related to habitual bipedalism, one of the most striking features of the human lineage. Recent discoveries (up to 7 My) highlight an unexpected diversity of locomotor anatomies in Hominins that lead palaeoanthropologists to hypothesize that bipedalism in hominins took distinct shapes in the course of human evolution; these bipedal locomotions were not transitional nor inefficient, but on the contrary probably constituted efficient and well-coordinated positional modes. A much more complex scenario of hominin evolution than that proposed only few years ago thus emerges where knowledge on locomotor anatomy takes an increasing important role. HoBiS wants to shed new light on our phylogenetic history by integrating to these scenarios new knowledge on the possible bipedal capacities in relation to locomotor anatomy. As a main methodological objective and improvement in the field of Evolutionary Anthropology and Functional Anatomy, HoBiS wants to develop a totally new specimen-specific approach in evolutionary anthropology named Specimen-Specific Functional Morphology: a standardized and specimen-specific decision-support-system (DSS) that aims to better assess the form-function relationships based on partial anatomical knowledge. To achieve these objectives, HoBiS will integrate and improve fundamental and technical knowledge from various scientific fields: Hominin’ locomotor anatomy, comparative functional anatomy and biomechanics, as well as anatomical modelling and motion simulation, to address the following challenges: inferring plausible complete locomotor anatomies based on partial fossil remains, to link these reconstructed anatomies and corresponding musculoskeletal models (MSM) to plausible gait using simulation. Both challenges need to collect a wide database of comparative anatomy and gait biomechanics to calibrate and validate the system. In that aim, HoBiS gathers 5 French labs (3 partners) and 1 Belgian (non-funded) research centers and experts in evolutionary anthropology, in functional anatomy, biomechanics, numerical modelling and simulation. They designed a work program around 4 main scientific work packages: WP1 - Gather a large database of comparative anatomy (living humans and non-human primates (NHP) and fossil specimens) and motion (living humans and NHP) - We expect HoBiS to provide the widest comparative anatomical and bipedal gait database for a large variety of NHPs, as well as humans and fossil hominins. WP2 – Design a computer-assisted modeling of full anatomy and MSM based on partial anatomical information. We expect HoBiS to reconstruct numerous hominin species, and significantly improve our knowledge of Hominin locomotor anatomy. WP3 – Tools of simulation of bipedal gaits - We expect HoBiS to propose in-silico prediction of plausible locomotion with regards to specimen-specific MSM developed in WP2. WP4 - Application scenarios on fossil specimens - We expect our approach to significantly improve in accuracy and numbers of species (7 hominin species) our knowledge of the bipedal capacities in hominins all along our phylogenetic history.We expect the Specimen-Specific Functional Morphology to significantly increase fundamental knowledge on mechanisms of bipedal walking and the anatomical basis thereof in living primates and hominins. It will allow us to address the complexity of our evolutionary history, and could be reused in the field of Evolutionary Anthropology and comparative biology to address other functions. Important impacts are expected in the other fields including biomechanics, motor control, sciences of motion and robotics.