The exoskeleton for lower limbs “twin” wins the Compasso D’Oro International Award

The prestigious international award goes to the researchers of Rehab Technologies IIT – INAIL and the designers of ddpstudio, who worked side by side to develop a functional technology designed around end-users’ needs.

Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia - IIT

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The motorized exoskeleton TWIN is a wearable robot designed to provide energy to people with little or no mobility enabling them to stand up, maintain an upright position, walk, and sit down, with important applications in medicine and rehabilitation therapies.

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Credit: IIT-ddpstudio

Genoa (Italy), September 10, 2025 – During EXPO Osaka 2025, the official award ceremony of the Compasso d’Oro International Award - promoted by ADI (Associazione per il Disegno Industriale) in collaboration with the General Commissioner’s Office for Italy at Expo 2025 Osaka -, was held on Friday September 5 at the Italy Pavilion.

The international jury awarded 20 Compasso d’Oro prizes and 35 Honorable Mentions to projects from around the world, selected for their insight in interpreting the theme of the Universal Exposition: “Designing Future Society for Our Lives.”

Among the winners of Compasso d’Oro International Award is TWIN, the robotic exoskeleton for lower limbs developed by Rehab Technologies IIT – INAIL, the joint laboratory established by the Italian Institute of Technology and the INAIL Prosthetic Center in Budrio, with the contribution of design studio ddpstudio. Since 2013, Rehab Tech and ddpstudio have worked together to merge the functionality of cutting-edge robotics with research on form and aesthetics, creating devices that are both highly functional and visually appealing, an essential factor for user acceptance.

TWIN was awarded the Compasso d’Oro with the following motivation: “Compasso d’Oro for designing a modular exoskeleton capable of adapting to different configurations based on user needs, allowing individuals with spinal injuries to walk again and restoring both physical and emotional potential”.

Simone Traverso, researcher at Rehab Technologies IIT – INAIL, together with Lorenzo De Bartolomeis and Gabriele Diamanti, both designers at ddpstudio, accepted the award during the ceremony, which included addresses by Mario Vattani, Commissioner General for Italy at Expo 2025 Osaka, Dimitri S. Kerkentzes, Secretary General of the Bureau International des Expositions (BIE), and Luciano Galimberti, President of ADI.

The motorized exoskeleton TWIN is a wearable robot designed to provide energy to people with little or no mobility enabling them to stand up, maintain an upright position, walk, and sit down, with important applications in medicine and rehabilitation therapies.

Developed to adapt to the end user, the device has been refined through clinical testing with patients and is designed to support the reintegration of severely injured workers into both social and professional contexts.

The current version of TWIN provides advanced structural and software design for greater customization to individual users. The device’s frame is adjustable via telescopic links at the femur and tibia levels. Ankles and foot supports are available in different sizes to match ergonomics of end user, whether male or female, young or adult.

By placing patients and their needs at the core of development, TWIN’s operating modes adapt to the degree of motor deficit, particularly to whether the wearer is able to walk independently.

“It is an honor to receive this award, which recognizes the joint efforts of researchers, clinicians, designers, and patients in developing a technology that combines aesthetics with functionality and usability. Beyond being one of the most performing exoskeletons for lower limbs, TWIN was conceived and built together with patients and caregivers to facilitate use both in clinical and private contexts,” said Matteo Laffranchi, Head of Rehab Technologies IIT – INAIL.

“We are proud to receive this international award for the design of the TWIN exoskeleton. It was the first project we developed with the Rehab Technologies IIT – INAIL team, involving patients, clinicians, engineers, scientists, and designers in a continuous and participatory design process. This recognition highlights the strategic importance of industrial design as a tool within research and technology transfer projects. Designing for people, starting by listening to their specific needs, to significantly improve their quality of life, is the most rewarding goal we can achieve as designers,” added Lorenzo De Bartolomeis, Gabriele Diamanti, and Filippo Poli of ddpstudio.

“This is yet another prestigious recognition for the results of INAIL’s prosthetics and rehabilitation research projects, confirming the value of a user-centered design approach as it places patients at the core of the main development phases. This process strengthens the fundamental role of design in technologies that work in close contact with people,” said Emanuele Gruppioni, Technical Director of Research at the INAIL Prosthetic Center.

The winning projects will be on display at the Italy Pavilion until the closing of Expo 2025 on October 13, offering the international public the opportunity to explore the most significant solutions for the future of global society. The ceremony and exhibition will then be hosted in Milan, at the ADI Design Museum, on December 9, 2025, and will remain open until January 6, 2026.

 

Study suggests a novel approach for building communication and social connection among individuals with autism spectrum disorder

Findings published in Biological Psychiatry indicate that people with similar levels of autistic traits are more attracted to each other, and their brains synchronize in unique ways during passive and active communication

Elsevier

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New research in Biological Psychiatry reveals that individuals with similar levels of autistic traits are more attracted to each other, and their brains synchronize in unique ways during passive and active communication, offering new insights into the Double Empathy Problem and the neural mechanisms of social interaction. This image depicts the experiment’s settings. (A) An illustration of the experimental setup. Figures wearing identical clothing represent participants with the same Autism Quotient type. (B) Cap configuration. Functional near-infrared spectroscopy data were recorded simultaneously in the frontal area and bilateral temporoparietal junction for each participant. The emitters and detectors were represented by red and blue circles, respectively, with measured channels labeled using black numbers. (C) Experimental procedure flowchart.

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Credit: Biological Psychiatry / Feng et al.

Philadelphia, September 10, 2025 – New research has revealed that people with similar levels of autistic traits are more attracted to each other, and their brains synchronize in unique ways during passive and active communication. The findings of the novel study in Biological Psychiatry, published by Elsevier, offer new insights into the Double Empathy Problem and the neural mechanisms of social interaction, suggesting that tailoring environments could reduce social fatigue and increase meaningful connection for individuals with autism.

This study expands on the Double Empathy Problem, which reframes autism's social challenges as differences between individuals in communication rather than pointing only to a deficit in empathy on the part of the autistic person. In addition, the Dialectical Misattunement Hypothesis (DMH) suggests that interaction between people with similar autistic traits will be smoother and reflected in neural synchronization.

“By situating autism research within the Double Empathy and DMH frameworks, we move beyond deficit language and show that individuals with higher autistic traits may engage different—not simply weaker—neural coordination strategies during real communication. With increasing emphasis on inclusion and neurodiversity, identifying conditions under which social connection flourishes is timely and policy relevant,” explains lead investigator Xuejun Bai, PhD, Faculty of Psychology, Academy of Psychology and Behavior, and Key Research Base of Humanities and Social Sciences of the Ministry of Education, Tianjin Normal University, Tianjin, China.

Co-lead investigator Peng Zhang, PhD, Faculty of Psychology, Academy of Psychology and Behavior, and Key Research Base of Humanities and Social Sciences of the Ministry of Education, Tianjin Normal University, adds, “Our team has a long-standing interest in the neural bases of communication challenges in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and in individuals with varying levels of autistic traits. We believed that studying naturalistic, group-based communication—rather than only structured or one-to-one laboratory tasks—could reveal how neurological alignment (or misalignment) emerges in real conversations. Our motivation is practical and humanistic: We want every-day social exchanges to become easier and more rewarding for autistic people and those who interact with them—not merely to raise scores on communication ‘skills’ tests.”

This study is one of the first to combine mixed trait, four-person group discussions (30 groups; 20 female and 10 male), each containing two individuals high in autistic traits and two low in autistic traits. Using the Social Relations Model, researchers measured to what extent participants liked and were attracted to each group member and recorded cortical activity with functional near‑infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) during two phases: (1) passive story listening and (2) the active, turn‑taking discussion.

Key findings include:

• Individuals with similar levels of autistic traits reported feeling more interpersonally attracted to one another when their opinions aligned during a group discussion.
• Brain-to-brain analyses showed that neural synchronization depends on both trait similarity and social context.
• Low autistic trait pairs synchronized more during passive listening, whereas in active discussion low-trait and high-trait pairs engaged different brain networks.

John Krystal, MD, Editor of Biological Psychiatry, comments, “This research shifts our approach to (mis)communication in individuals with ASD. The finding that people who are neurally ‘in sync’ with each other find social connection easier, suggests a novel approach for building social connection among people with ASD.”

Dr. Bai concludes, “Our data suggest that successful communication depends on the match between partners—both in trait profile and in shared conversational ground—not solely on individual skill. Recognizing that high autistic trait individuals can achieve effective interaction when contexts support their strengths helps reorient interventions toward mutual adaptation. Structuring discussions, clarifying turn taking, and aligning expectations may promote neural and social attunement. Ultimately, tailoring environments—not just training individuals—could reduce social fatigue and increase meaningful connection for autistic people.”

 

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Journal

Biological Psychiatry

DOI

10.1016/j.biopsych.2025.06.031 

Method of Research

Imaging analysis

Subject of Research

People

Article Title

Attraction Through Similarity in Autistic Traits: A Group Communication Study Using Social Relations Model and fNIRS Hyperscanning

COI Statement

The authors’ affiliations and disclosures of financial and conflicts of interests are available in the article. John H. Krystal, MD, is Chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at the Yale University School of Medicine, Chief of Psychiatry at Yale-New Haven Hospital, and a research psychiatrist at the VA Connecticut Healthcare System. His disclosures of financial and conflicts of interests are available at https://www.biologicalpsychiatryjournal.com/content/bps-editorial-disclosures.

 

AI salespeople aren’t better than humans… yet

Artificial intelligence is changing how we shop online, but when it comes to selling products through livestreams, humans still have the edge.

University of British Columbia

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Avatars tested by the team in the study: On the right, a basic cartoon-like Avatar, and on the left a more human-looking avatar.

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Credit: Credit: Yanwen Yang.

Artificial intelligence is changing how we shop online, but when it comes to selling products through livestreams, humans still have the edge.

A new study from the UBC Sauder School of Business shows that AI-powered “digital streamers”—virtual salespeople who appear in livestreams to promote products—don’t perform as well as human streamers. In fact, they barely outperform having no streamer at all.

“People assume that if businesses are using digital streamers, they must be doing well. But they aren’t, at least not in their current incarnation,” said UBC Sauder associate professor Dr. Yanwen Wang, a co-author of the study in Information Systems Research.

The research team looked at sales data from a popular fashion retailer on Tmall.com, one of the world’s largest e-commerce platforms. They compared sales of 328 products before and after the retailer introduced digital streamers. Of those, 72 were promoted by digital streamers, 74 by human streamers, and 182 had no streamer at all.

The results were clear: Human streamers significantly boosted sales. Digital streamers, on the other hand, showed only a small improvement over having no streamer—and far less than their human counterparts.

But the researchers didn’t stop there. They wanted to understand why digital streamers were falling short and how they could be improved.

In a second part of the study, they worked with a new online grocery retailer on Tmall that also used digital streamers. The team tested different versions of the streamers, starting with a basic cartoon-like avatar and gradually adding features to make them seem more human, such as realistic voices and the ability to answer questions in real time.

They found that two things made the biggest difference: form realism (how human the streamer looks) and behavioural realism (how well the streamer interacts with viewers).

The most effective upgrade was giving the digital streamer the ability to answer questions in real time. This feature led to a 25-per-cent increase in the number of products sold and an 86-per-cent jump in revenue. Adding a lottery feature—where viewers could win prizes during the livestream—also helped, boosting sales by 17 per cent and revenue by 70 per cent.

“Human-like voices and improved visual appearances also contributed to gains, but to a lesser degree,” said Dr. Wang. “Only enhanced real-time Q&A interactions allowed the digital streamers to achieve sales performances on par with human streamers.”

This suggests that timely, interactive engagement is a key to driving sales.

Dr. Wang says the best future approach may be a mix of human and AI. For example, a human could monitor several AI streamers at once, stepping in to answer questions when needed.

Digital streamers do have one big advantage: cost. Unlike humans, they can livestream 24 hours a day without breaks or salaries. But businesses need to understand what works and what doesn’t before relying on them.

“When businesses are choosing digital streamers, they hope they’ll work as well as human streamers,” said Dr. Wang. “But our study shows there’s no lift in sales at all—unless you improve how they interact with customers.”

The study is the first to offer real-world evidence of how digital streamers affect sales, and how their design can be improved. It was co-authored by Dr. Wang, Dr. Yahui Liu of Nanjing Audit University, Dr. Shuai Yang of Donghua University and Dr. Lei Wang of Indiana University.

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Journal

Information Systems Research

DOI

10.1287/isre.2023.0024 

Article Title

AI-Powered Digital Streamers in Online Retail: Empirical Insights and Design Strategies from Experiments

 

Phage research: Hacked!

Researchers from HIRI and HZI gain insight into the molecular world of phages and bacteria

Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research

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Like humans, bacteria have to cope with viruses—known as bacteriophages, or phages for short. Phages invade bacteria, hijack their cellular machinery, multiply, and cause the bacterial cell to burst. This releases new phages, which then go on to infect other bacteria. Phages are harmless to humans because they target only bacteria. They are also quite selective: Most phages are specialized to infect specific host bacteria, including bacterial pathogens.

"By attacking and decimating pathogens, phages protect our health as a side effect—in a kind of covert operation, so to speak. Harnessing their therapeutic potential, especially against the backdrop of increasing antibiotic resistance, would be a game changer," says Jörg Vogel, lead author of the study. Vogel is the founding director of the Helmholtz Institute for RNA-based Infection Research (HIRI) in Würzburg, a site of the Braunschweig Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research (HZI) in cooperation with the Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg (JMU). He also heads the Institute of Molecular Infection Biology (IMIB) at the JMU Medical Faculty.

Molecular tool introduced – phage manipulated

"In order to use phages therapeutically, we need a much better understanding of the molecular interaction between phages and host bacteria," says Milan Gerovac, the study's first author. Gerovac was a postdoc in Vogel's laboratory and now runs the junior research group ”Complexes in Phage-Infected Cells” at the HZI. "Not much is known about this. One reason being that phages protect their genetic material from cellular defense systems of the bacteria with a kind of protective shield. Unfortunately, this shield is also quite effective against common molecular investigation methods."

To decipher the molecular phage-host relationship, they need a new approach—and that is exactly what the HIRI researchers did in their current study. With an innovative RNA-based molecular tool known as antisense oligomers (ASOs), they succeeded in interfering specifically with the phage reproduction cycle. "The ASOs introduced into the bacterial cell switched off the synthesis of specific phage proteins at a key point," Gerovac explains. "We were able to 'hack' into phage replication with the ASOs, so to speak."

ASOs can be synthesized in a lab to bind precisely to specific sites on messenger RNA (mRNA), which transmits information from the genome to the protein synthesis machinery. The ASOs act as a stumbling block at the starting point of protein production; the mRNA can no longer be read, so protein synthesis does not begin. Antibacterial ASOs, also known as programmable antibiotics or asobiotics, have been studied for some time in Vogel's laboratory. "Since ASOs are known to inhibit protein synthesis in bacteria, we suspected that they could also do so in phages. This is because phages reproduce with the help of the host bacteria's cellular machinery,” says Vogel. "And we were absolutely right!"

In focus: A Jumbo Phage That Kills Hospital Germs

Using ASO technology, the researchers successfully prevented phage propagation in various phage-bacteria pairs, demonstrating that the approach is broadly applicable. Their research focused on a jumbo phage called KZ that could potentially treat dangerous infections of wounds, airways, and lungs caused by the hospital germ Pseudomonas aeruginosa. "Jumbo phages have a very large genome," Gerovac explains. "With the help of ASOs, we were able to systematically switch off the synthesis of a large number of phage proteins. Using this knock-down screening approach, we identified previously unknown proteins central to phage propagation."

The researchers hope that ASO technology will be widely used in phage research to better understand the fundamental molecular mechanisms of phages and advance the development of new therapeutic approaches in the fight against bacterial pathogens.

Funding:

The study was funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) in the priority program "New Concepts of Virus-Host Interaction in Prokaryotes — From Single Cells to Microbial Communities" and by a Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize (both awarded to Jörg Vogel). Vogel is also a member of the DFG Cluster of Excellence NUCLEATE and the BMBF Cluster CNAT-M.

Text: Nicole Silbermann (translated by HIRI)

This press release is also available on our website: https://www.helmholtz-hzi.de/en/media-center/newsroom/news-detail/phage-research-hacked/.

Helmholtz Institute for RNA-based Infection Research:

The Helmholtz Institute for RNA-based Infection Research (HIRI) is the first institution of its kind worldwide to combine ribonucleic acid (RNA) research with infection biology. Based on novel findings from its strong basic research program, the institute’s long-term goal is to develop innovative therapeutic approaches to better diagnose and treat human infections. HIRI is a site of the Braunschweig Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research (HZI) in cooperation with the Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg (JMU) and is located on the Würzburg Medical Campus. More information at www.helmholtz-hiri.de.

Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research:

Scientists at the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research (HZI) in Braunschweig and its other sites in Germany are engaged in the study of bacterial and viral infections and the body’s defense mechanisms. They have a profound expertise in natural compound research and its exploitation as a valuable source for novel anti-infectives. As member of the Helmholtz Association and the German Center for Infection Research (DZIF) the HZI performs translational research laying the ground for the development of new treatments and vaccines against infectious diseases. www.helmholtz-hzi.de/en

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Journal

Nature

DOI

10.1038/s41586-025-09499-6 

Method of Research

Experimental study

Subject of Research

Cells

Article Title

Programmable antisense oligomers for phage functional genomics

Article Publication Date

10-Sep-2025

 

Cooperation and competition: How fetal and maternal cells evolved to work together

Study published in PNAS reexamines the genetic conflict in the maternal-fetal interface

University of Connecticut

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The maternal-fetal interface is the meeting point for maternal and fetal cells during pregnancy. It’s been long understood as an area of conflict, where the placenta–a fetal organ– invades the mother to access nutrients.

This is an unusual situation because, in a normal case, foreign cells should be rejected by the immune system. During pregnancy, they are tolerated. However, mother’s cells also limit this invasion to an optimal state. The fight has continued for millions of years in evolution.

In the latest issue of the Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Kshitiz, associate professor of biomedical engineering at the UConn School of Dental Medicine, demonstrates that pregnancy is not solely a conflict between mother and baby, rather, a delicate balance of cooperation and competition that has evolved overtime to ensure a successful pregnancy.

Postdoctoral fellows Yasir Suhail and Wenqiang Du, along with Gunter Wagner at Yale and Junaid Afzal at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) also contributed to this research.

Wagner, former chair of evolutionary biology at Yale, and Kshitiz previously argued that there has to be cooperation between the mother and the fetus in order to sustain the pregnancy. Although the scientific discipline has mostly talked about genetic conflict, evidence of cooperation which modulates this conflict has been lacking.

“The maternal fetal interface, for this is what the placenta-uterus interaction is called, is like an unresolved frontier between countries. There is so much difference between different species, which is not found for any other organ,” said Kshitiz.

In anticipation of pregnancy, the endometrium undergoes a process called decidualization, the thickening of the tissue which women experience in each menstrual cycle. This process of deposition of matrix prevents excessive invasion by placental cells into the endometrium. Afzal and Du, demonstrated that placental cells influence the mother’s own cells to degrade their own matrix– a very surprising finding.

“It is this active persuasion by the placental cells which made the mother’s endometrial cells to reduce her own defenses by secreting a protein, which was so surprising,” Wagner said.

Suhail modeled the molecular interactions between placental and endometrial cells as an electric flow problem, identifying the key circuit underlying this manipulation.

“It is rare, and heartening to see such close integrated collaboration between computation, and experimentation. My model was created by experimental data, and the discovery was validated by experiments,” said Suhail.

In game theory, the mix of competition and cooperation is known as co-opetition. The maternal-fetal interface, the researchers found, is home to a myriad of cell interactions that embody the true meaning of co-opetition.

Kshitiz credits a conversation with an economics professor from the United Kingdom, Dr. Anshuman Chutani, who told him about the extensive literature in econometrics on co-opetition.

“It is a term which we gladly borrowed,” said Kshitiz. “It is not merely cooperation by the endometrium, but an induced cooperation between competitors.”

In the maternal-fetal interface, the fetal cells work to actively persuade maternal cells to stop building protective tissue so that fetal cells can effectively invade the placenta and retrieve nutrients. Crucially, this interaction does not happen alone—it depends on the mother’s cells own readiness to respond to signals coming from the placenta. This proves that placental invasion is more of a combination of competition and cooperation between maternal and fetal tissues, not simply an area of conflict as previously believed.

This discovery does not only shed light on pregnancy complications that involve problems with placental invasion, such as placenta accreta and preeclampsia, but may also have broader implications on cancer metastasis and understanding how certain cancers invade the body.

“This study, jointly conducted by scientists at UConn Health, Yale, and UCSF, can shift the way we think about conflict between the generations, right during when the fetus is still in mother’s womb,” said Kshitiz.

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Journal

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences