Novel Devices for Haptics Repurposing (From Metaverses Towards a Mechanobiological Cancer Treatment)

In the pharmaceutics and drug research fields, the term “repurposing ”refers to the practice of testing the effects of an already assessed drug and its molecules on pathologies different from the one for which the medicine was created. Sometimes, repurposing allows researchers to discover new ways to treat serious pathologies and diseases. For example, thalidomide, initially marketed as a sedative, was later found to be effective in treating multiple myeloma, a type of cancer. Similarly, AZT (Zidovudine), originally developed as a cancer drug, became the first approved treatment for HIV/AIDS. Additionally, technologies can also be repurposed. Extended Realities and their graphic engines, typically used for producing video games, are now being utilized in medicine to visualize 3D models of organs, in factories for training and instructing workers, and in communication to render the body language of companions through avatars, among other applications. In this thesis, the repurposing of haptic technologies will be discussed, drawing from a study of state-of-the-art haptics and notable examples of reusing tactile displays for various applications. Devices for rendering the sense of touch provided by interaction with virtual objects will be presented for their potential applications in enhancing the user experience of metaverses. Tactile displays for kinesthetic and cutaneous stimulation are designed and redesigned to tailor rehabilitation and manual treatment of trauma and chronic pain in human extremities. Finally, a completely innovative use of haptic methods and technologies is proposed as a tool to investigate new therapies for cancer inhibition based on mechanobiology theories. Here, the role of ad-hoc soft haptic technologies as instruments to dissect the relationship between the low recurrence of cancer in the cardiac muscle and the mechanical load of a heartbeat is investigated. All these new application fields will be presented and categorized based on their level of novelty, progressing from haptic technologies enriching metaverse-mediated dialogs with humans and surroundings to the exploration of new treatments for superficial tumors, such as melanoma or breast cancer, based on mimicking the heart pulse on the skin. This work aims to expand the application fields of haptics toward new frontiers of digitality and reality.