Anagrafe della ricerca

mechanisms underlying the recovery and the effectiveness of treatments are often not completely unraveled. Neuromotor rehabilitation plays a crucial role in the reduction of disability with a positive impact on quality of life and social reintegration, also contributing to the reduction of the huge economic burden for the families and the national health system. For this reason, biomedical engineering research is striving to develop new technologies to this aim. Although robotics-based interventions have shown great potential, these solutions are still complex and expensive, which limits their widespread adoption. At the same time, low-cost systems exploiting simple bodyweight exercises, albeit adopting virtual reality (VR) and motion tracking tools, do not usually go beyond the conventional movement/task-oriented exercises. On these premises, the VISIONARY project aims at bringing bodyweight neuromotor rehabilitation beyond the conventional approaches, by studying the impact of advanced visual feedback in exercises featuring VR, for the improvement of the neural control of upper-limb movements. The project will conceive a new generation of bidirectional body-computer interfaces in which the information collected in real-time about upper-limb biomechanics and muscular activity, becomes a hidden actuator of the controlled virtual object in the VR. This approach will project each person in a virtual scenario characterized by physical laws, unknown to the participant, applied to the controlled object guiding to achieve the correct execution of the exercise and targeting specific changes of individual motor and muscle strategies. Visual effects applied to the controlled objects will include attractors, (visco)elastic fields, non-linear space distortions, and changes in its visibility. This innovative feedback will go beyond the current approaches, includingerror augmentation, targeting only final performance. Neuromotor recovery has many aspects in common with the learning of motor skills: if opportunely programmed, these interfaces could help reshape compensatory motor strategies normally adopted to contrast the impairment, which leads to serious problems in the long term. This is particularly relevant in unsupervised rehabilitation, where corrections and feedback must be provided by automatic systems. By pursuing the adoption of unobtrusive affordable technologies, whose use can be widespread both in clinical settings and at home, for long-term rehabilitation programs, the project will overcome the limitations that relegate current expensive rehabilitation technologies to elite clinics. The technologies and methods developed in VISIONARY will be validated on unimpaired volunteers to assess adaptation and retention, and pilot-tested on a small cohort of people with spinal cord injury and stroke.