Objectives
BMIs have been originally developed for training upper body motion of people with high-level spinal cord injury and have a far-reaching potential in the rehabilitation domain. The main goal of this project is to apply these technologies also to age related problems and translate them into an innovative low cost personal guidance system (PGS) suitable for home use, that could target body posture, movements, and force production tasks.
The work will be organized in 3 secondary objectives (SO):
S01: Technical development of the PGS. Integration of low-cost hardware and software for decoding of body signals and mapping into command for workspace control.
S02: Definition of methods and protocol for assessment and treatment of different sensory-motor problems.
S03: Pilot testing of the PGS system in 3 different environments and with subjects affected by different sensorimotor deficits.
The collaboration between the two RUs will be crucial to pursue the objectives of the proposed research because it will allow for the integration of technologies and knowledge already developed and tested by each unit. While both units have a tradition on robot-assisted rehabilitation, functional evaluation of human performance, and leaning abilities in healthy and pathological subjects, they have developed different but complementary methodologies and expertise. For example, the Italian unit has a strong background on studying postural control, while the US units has a solid reputation on motion and force control and their interaction. Also with respect to the subjects' population, while both units have experience with stroke survivors, US RU has a secondary focus on spinal cord injury subjects and IT RU on multiple sclerosis and elderly people. This will allow both units to increase their level of expertise in these fields. In addition, the collaboration will help the translation of the research findings into the clinic in a large scale and with an international perspective.
Objective