Design of technology-based rehabilitation pathways: the experience of Santobono-Pausilipon Hospital

The fields of rehabilitation robotics and virtual reality (VR) are becoming a growing area in the clinical rehabilitation of people with motion impairments. These systems have the potential to assess abilities through physiological measurements and modelling activities such as posture, gait, and balance. They can be used as rehabilitative tools by providing patients with task-specific training in a motivating and engaging way too. Although the potential advantages of such systems, until now there is a general limitation of their use in rehabilitative practice. Robotics and VR systems can be challenging, engaging and fun, particularly for children with disabilities, since they are often not very motivated to comply with conventional therapy. The aim of this work is to accurately describe the clinical use of innovative rehabilitative technologies and their use for the development of two technology-based rehabilitation pathways for the treatment of gait disorders following obesity and neurological diseases in treatment of pediatric patients

Development of software tool for quantitative gait assessment in Parkinsonian patients with and without Mild Cognitive Impairment

The construct of Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) is considered as a transition state between normal aging and dementia. Originally it has been conceptualized as the transitional state between normalcy and Alzheimer's disease (AD), more recently, it has been applied to patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) as pre-dementia state. The relationship between cognition and gait disturbances has received increasing attention and is well established. In order to perform a quantitative assessment of gait in PD patients with or without MCI, an operating software tool has been developed. Ittakes advantage of the potentialities of the software Qualisys Track Manager and of the Matlab and allows the quantitative evaluation of the cinematic parameters of the human gait. © 2010 International Federation for Medical and Biological Engineering

Kinematic indexes' reproducibility of horizontal reaching movements

Upper limb reaching movements are the most used motor task both in diagnosis and rehabilitation treatments of several movement disorders of the arm and the shoulder of various central and peripheral etiology. One of the most appealing features of these new technologies consists in the possibility to record and measure motions and mechanical indexes, allowing quantitative kinematics evaluations, while traditional clinical scales permit only qualitative and potentially disagreeing evaluations, since carried out by different therapists. Few papers have actually addressed this issue and aim of the study is the assessment the reproducibility of kinematics indexes of upper arm horizontal reaching movements in normal subjects during RMT. We studied 10 normal subjects (35??????8 year old, males). Each subject underwent to 2 sessions, repeating each reaching protocol at four different target amplitudes of 15??????, 20??????, 25?????? and 30?????? and at three different target velocity, respectively of 20??????/s, 30??????/s and 40??????/s, with at least intervals of 15'of resting time between each trial. Reaching movements have been performed by a shoulder rehabilitation, the Multi-Joint-System (MJS) of the Tecnobody, equipped by a four freedom ranges mechanical arm, was used. Although all parameters generally showed a poor reproducibility, it can be noted that both kurtosys and symmetry indexes showed the lower bias values, ranging between 8 to 9%, while both symmetry and smoothness indexes showed doubled bias values. The kurtosys is also the parameter with the lower standard deviation of the bias and so it can be considered as the more reproducible kinematic index between the studied parameters. Bland-Altman plots showed that the scatter of all kinematic indexes measures around the bias line is not constant but getting larger as the average gets higher, like for example for the kurtosys, or getting larger as the average gets lower, like for example for the skewness. ?????? Springer International Publishing Swit zerland 2014