Urban floods: a case study in the Savigliano area (North-Western Italy)

Flood processes and effects are examined, concerning two rivers in an urbanized area in North-Western Italy (Piedmont – Cuneo Plain). In May 2008, some areas in Northern Italy were struck by intense and persistent rainfall. In the Cuneo province (Southern Piedmont), floodplain with some urban areas was inundated over ca. ten square kilometres, and the city of Savigliano (about 21 000 inhabitants) was particularly hit by flood. A purposely-made historical research has evidenced approximately fifty flood events as having occurred since 1350 in the Savigliano area. Based upon historical data, both documents and maps, GIS (Geographical Information System) technique and field surveys were used to quantitatively assess the growing urbanization of the city and to describe flood processes and effects over years. This work aims to describe the dynamic behaviour of the 2008 flood, also comparing it to past events, in particular those that occurred in 1896. It is emphasized how the knowledge of past events can be helpful in reducing urban flooding

BCI-Based Neuro-Rehabilitation Treatment for Parkinson’s Disease: cases Report

Parkinson's Disease (PD) is characterized by motor and cognitive decay, coupled to an alteration of brain oscillatory patterns. In this study a novel neuro-rehabilitation tool, based on the application of motor imagery into a Brain Computer Interface system, is presented with some preliminary data. Three patients were evaluated (with motor, neuropsychological and EEG testing) before and after a neuro-rehabilitation protocol made by 15 experimental sessions. Patients showed a decrease of freezing of gait severity, an improvement in alpha and beta EEG bands power, and a better performance on some attention and executive tasks

PolyMorph: A P300 Polymorphic Speller

P300 is an electric signal emitted by brain about 300 milliseconds after a rare, but relevant-for-the-user event. Even if it is hard to identify and it provides a low-rate communication channel, it can be used in cases in which other evoked potentials fail. One of the applications of this signal is a speller that enables subjects who lost the control of their motor pathways to communicate by selecting one by one each character of a sentence in a matrix containing all the alphabet symbols. This paper provides an improvement of this paradigm and it aims at reducing both the error rate and the time required to spell a sentence by exploiting the redundancy which is present in all the natural languages