A telerehabilitation platform for cognitive, physical and behavioural rehabilitation in elderly patients affected by dementia

Dementia is one of the main causes of disability in elderly people and its treatment becomes, year after year, an increasingly compelling priority for the public health system. In the last years, home assistance and telemedicine have paved the way to decrease the treatments’ costs and to improve the patients and caregivers quality of life quality. In this framework, the aim of ABILITY project is to design, develop and validate an integrated platform of services aimed at supporting and enhancing the rehabilitation process for patients with dementia at their homes. ABILITY platform allows the clinician to assign rehabilitation plans with a strong compliance monitoring, enabled by the technological solutions integrated, and the holistic approach to rehabilitation, as the plan includes physical, cognitive and behavioral therapies/exercises. The ABILITY platform will be assessed through a set of validation activities, involving a small group of pilot patients, and a Randomized Control Trial. In conclusion, the ABILITY project generates a series of assistive services inside a modular and flexible platform, adaptable to the single patient and his/her needs, increasing the treatment efficiency and efficacy with respect to the state of the art

Tele-Rehabilitation Platform for Upper and Lower Limb in Elderly Patients , the HEAD Project .

Tele-rehabilitation systems have been increasingly studied, becoming an important complement to traditional therapy as they can provide high-intensity, repetitive and interactive treatments of the injured extremities. Several systems have been developed in research projects and some of these have become products mainly for being used at hospitals and care centers. After the initial rehabilitation performed at rehabilitation centers, patients are obliged to go to the centers, with many consequences, as costs, loss of time, discomfort and demotivation. However, it has been demonstrated that patients recovering at home heal faster because surrounded by the love of their relatives and with the community support. So, there is a strong need for rehabilitation systems to use at home. There are already some devices available on the market for home care: their main weakness is the limited strategy for motor learning. The ambition of the Human Empowerment Aging and Disability (HEAD) project is to combine assistance with appropriate feedback to close the loop in motor learning strategy for the home. HEAD platform challenging objective is to develop a novel tele-rehabilitation system and related provision services for a holistic rehabilitation aiming at restoring limb motor functional abilities, and at launching both system and services at home. The tele-rehabilitation system is based on the use of low cost sensors, connected with a gaming module for cognitive-motor rehabilitation, and integrated with an infrastructure connecting the patient at home with therapists at hospitals who monitor the rehabilitation exercises