Augmenting Human Experience and Performance through Interaction Technologies

About this Research Topic

Background

The enhancement of human (sensory, cognitive, motor) capabilities constitutes an essential challenge with growing interest from interdisciplinary research fields aiming to understand and push the boundaries of human experience and performance. In particular, interaction technologies can be designed for restoring abilities (through rehabilitative, prosthetic, and assistive solutions) or empowering professional skills in hazardous (e.g., surgery) or competitive (e.g., sport) contexts. On the other hand, these digital and robotic systems can lead us to unexpected perspectives that seem re-defining the concept itself of human limits. Indeed, any device appearing into the market can create novel potentials for action (alongside regulatory gaps), especially when the human-machine integration reaches degrees of symbiosis that make the technological mediation almost invisible to the user. Accordingly, in order to understand the natural and artificial ways we adopt to interact with other agents, objects, and events, we need to re-think what human augmentation could (and should) mean.

Consequently, any augmentation cannot be said “human-centered” if we ignore how it can affect our behaviors and (especially) morals. A person with sensory, cognitive, motor enhancements could be unpredictable in actions (and reactions) because of the integration with a device: providing people with the capability to perform actions (even restoring it) beyond their limitations can dramatically change how they feel and move in any context. For this reason, this Research Topic faces interdisciplinary issues (related to disciplines like psychology, philosophy, neuroscience, ergonomics, computer science, engineering) of human augmentation processes based on the interaction between users and interaction technologies. The latter can spread the presence of people across real and virtual locations or make an individual far stronger and faster (even smarter) than the average (exceeding the traditional concept of tools like prostheses and exoskeletons as restorative and assistive systems). Encompassing these and other cases is a compulsory step for understanding humans surrounded (and intertwined) by devices that are changing their perspective on a world beyond the dreams (and the fears?) of our ancestors.

This Research Topic aims at gathering and organize systematic contributions on human augmentation processes, including:

• sensory, cognitive, and motor augmentation through technologies

• psychology, neuroscience, ergonomics, engineering in augmentation

• wearable robotics, from exoskeletons to exosuits and bionic prosthetics

• wearable and ubiquitous technologies to improve activities of daily living

• neurotechnologies, neuroergonomics, and augmented cognition

• neurointerfaces, neurofeedback, neuromodulation, cognitive prosthetics

• extended, mixed, augmented, and virtual realities (XR, MR, AR, VR)

• augmented humans in digital worlds, phygital worlds, and metaverse

• telerobotics, telepresence and teleoperation

• augmentation for rehabilitation and training (e.g., sport, surgery)

• translational biomedical research for human enhancement

• human augmentation technology design

• philosophical, ethical, and legal issues in human augmentation

The Research Topic will collect and publish all types of manuscripts, embracing a list of research areas not limited to the ones listed above.

Keywords: human augmentation, augmented human, augmented reality, augmented cognition, human-robot interaction, wearable robotics, cyborg

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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