Enhancing Archaeological Research Through Immersive Virtual Reality.

Virtual reality (VR) is increasingly employed in archaeology to showcase reconstructions of ancient sites to the general public, yet its utilization for professional purposes by archaeologists remains less common. To address this gap, we introduce a VR application specifically designed to streamline the storage and access of critical data for archaeological studies. This application provides experts with an immersive visualization of excavation sites and related information during the postexcavation analysis phase.

A perspective-based analysis of attachment from prenatal period to second year postnatal life.

Attachment is one of the foundational themes in the history of the psychological development of human beings. For this reason, we assume that it must be approached by taking into account multiple scientific perspectives. The present review aims at analyzing the state of the art regarding the genetic, neurobiological and cognitive mechanisms underlying the development of attachment bonding, considering the child as the frame of reference.

The Fondazione Toscana Gabriele Monasterio app: a digital health system to improve wellbeing of inpatients with heart or lung disease.

Background: An app providing material for education and entertaining is a possible way to support patients and healthcare providers in achieving person-centered care.

Methods: An app tailored on the Fondazione Toscana Gabriele Monasterio (FTGM), a research hospital treating cardiac and lung disorders, was created. A pilot evaluation project was conducted on consecutive patients hospitalized for heart or lung disorders.

Closed-Chain Inverse Dynamics for the Biomechanical Analysis of Manual Material Handling Tasks through a Deep Learning Assisted Wearable Sensor Network.

Despite the automatization of many industrial and logistics processes, human workers are still often involved in the manual handling of loads. These activities lead to many work-related disorders that reduce the quality of life and the productivity of aged workers. A biomechanical analysis of such activities is the basis for a detailed estimation of the biomechanical overload, thus enabling focused prevention actions.

Virtual Reality Training for Post-Earthquake Rescue Operators.

Urban Search And Rescue (USAR) personnel need to be appropriately trained to effectively operate in post-disaster conditions, as they need to quickly identify locations where the presence of survivors is more likely. Currently, the training procedure for this kind of triage is based on showing static pictures presenting different types of building collapses accompanied by cards providing additional environmental information. This article presents VRescue, a simulator for training USAR operators using the paradigm of immersive virtual reality (VR).

Using co-creation to develop a cardiology online open course: an effective approach for implementing digital learning.

Aims: we developed a massive online open course (MOOC) through co-creation between medical students and academic staff on heart semeiotics and evaluated its teaching efficiency and user satisfaction.

Methods: "The Heart, Its Signs and Symptoms" was a MOOC aimed to teach medical students to collect clinical history and perform physical examination of patients presenting with chest pain, dyspnea, palpitations, or syncope. It consisted of 4 interactive cases with preliminary, interim and final evaluation tests.

Inter-brain co-activations during mindfulness meditation. Implications for devotional and clinical settings.

Mindfulness meditation usually takes place as personal, introspective activity. It is not known if this practice activates the brain differently when done alone or with someone else. Sixteen couples of expert meditators performed mindfulness-oriented meditation (MOM) and instructed mind-wandering (IMW) tasks in two conditions: once sitting in the same room (SR) and once in two different rooms (DR).

Do Virtual Humans Dream of Digital Sheep?

As human beings, we are so used to interacting with each other that any world without humans would feel alien to us, including digital ones. In this article, we present a survey on the role of digital human-like characters in virtual worlds, both as counterparts of real human users and as embodied agents driven by artificial intelligence. The main issues related to 3-D graphics, physics, animation, and behavioral modeling are introduced, suggesting wherever available different alternatives and related development pipelines.

Spontaneous eye movements during focused-attention mindfulness meditation.

Oculometric measures have been proven to be useful markers of mind-wandering during visual tasks such as reading. However, little is known about ocular activity during mindfulness meditation, a mental practice naturally involving mind-wandering episodes. In order to explore this issue, we extracted closed-eyes ocular movement measurements via a covert technique (EEG recordings) from expert meditators during two repetitions of a 7-minute mindfulness meditation session, focusing on the breath, and two repetitions of a 7-minute instructed mind-wandering task.

An Orthopaedic Robotic-Assisted Rehabilitation Method of the Forearm in Virtual Reality Physiotherapy.

The use of robotic rehabilitation in orthopaedics has been briefly explored. Despite its possible advantages, the use of computer-assisted physiotherapy of patients with musculoskeletal injuries has received little attention. In this paper, we detailed the development and evaluation of a robotic-assisted rehabilitation system as a new methodology of assisted physiotherapy in orthopaedics.

Effects of Continuous Kinaesthetic Feedback Based on Tendon Vibration on Motor Imagery BCI Performance.

Background And Objectives: Feedback plays a crucial role for using brain computer interface systems. This paper proposes the use of vibration-evoked kinaesthetic illusions as part of a novel multisensory feedback for a motor imagery (MI)-based BCI and investigates its contributions in terms of BCI performance and electroencephalographic (EEG) correlates.

Methods: sixteen subjects performed two different right arm MI-BCI sessions: with the visual feedback only and with both visual and vibration-evoked kinaesthetic feedback, conveyed by the stimulation of the biceps brachi tendon.

Local and Remote Cooperation With Virtual and Robotic Agents: A P300 BCI Study in Healthy and People Living With Spinal Cord Injury.

The development of technological applications that allow people to control and embody external devices within social interaction settings represents a major goal for current and future brain-computer interface (BCI) systems. Prior research has suggested that embodied systems may ameliorate BCI end-user's experience and accuracy in controlling external devices. Along these lines, we developed an immersive P300-based BCI application with a head-mounted display for virtual-local and robotic-remote social interactions and explored in a group of healthy participants the role of proprioceptive feedback in the control of a virtual surrogate (Study 1).

Vitality Forms Processing in the Insula during Action Observation: A Multivoxel Pattern Analysis.

Observing the style of an action done by others allows the observer to understand the cognitive state of the agent. This information has been defined by Stern "vitality forms". Previous experiments showed that the dorso-central insula is selectively active both during vitality form observation and execution.

EEG ultradian rhythmicity differences in disorders of consciousness during wakefulness.

Temporal fluctuations of cognitively-mediated behaviors in minimally conscious state (MCS) have been linked to changes of awareness, but the time-pattern of these variations remains ill-described. We analyzed 4-h EEG recordings from 12 patients with disorders of consciousness (6 MCS and 6 vegetative state/unresponsive wakefulness syndrome, VS/UWS). Relative powers (delta, theta, alpha, beta1 and beta2 bands) and spectral entropy were estimated (Fz, Cz and Pz derivations).

Evaluation of the effects of the Arm Light Exoskeleton on movement execution and muscle activities: a pilot study on healthy subjects.

Background: Exoskeletons for lower and upper extremities have been introduced in neurorehabilitation because they can guide the patient's limb following its anatomy, covering many degrees of freedom and most of its natural workspace, and allowing the control of the articular joints. The aims of this study were to evaluate the possible use of a novel exoskeleton, the Arm Light Exoskeleton (ALEx), for robot-aided neurorehabilitation and to investigate the effects of some rehabilitative strategies adopted in robot-assisted training.

Methods: We studied movement execution and muscle activities of 16 upper limb muscles in six healthy subjects, focusing on end-effector and joint kinematics, muscle synergies, and spinal maps.

Desktop Haptic Interface for Simulation of Hand-Tremor.

This paper presents a haptic system that is conceived to support the design process of a class of products or services in order to make them more accessible to people affected by hand tremor diseases. The main aim is to foster the designer empathy allowing her/him to directly feel the effect of the impairment in first person. Specifically, a desktop haptic device is employed to induce a programmable hand-tremor, that is typically observed in people affected by some kind of neurological diseases, on healthy subjects (i.

Hypnotizability and the position sense: proprioceptive localization of the hand.

We  investigated whether healthy subjects with high (highs) and low (lows) hypnotizability scores differ in the ability to report the position of their right hand in the horizontal plane at the end of passive and active arm movements directed to lateral, intermediate and medial targets of the right hemispace under correct or incorrect visual feedback. Results showed that incorrect visual feedback increased the error in both groups. In lows, the error was similar after active and passive movements; in highs, it was lower for active than passive movements toward the medial position, but lower for passive than for active movements for the lateral one.

N400-like responses to three-chord harmonic sequences with unexpected out of key endings: scalp topography, cortical sources, and perspectives for a clinical use.

A series of ERP components, each provided with both a precise timing with respect to stimulation and a specific cortical localization, reflects the temporal succession of processing stages of music information. This makes the musical stimulus potentially usable to probe residual brain functions in non-communicating patients with disorders of consciousness. In an attempt to find a simple stimulation protocol that was suitable for use in a clinical setting, the purpose of this study was to verify whether a minimum-length musical stimulus, provided with a definite music-syntactic connotation, was still able to elicit musical ERPs in a group of eight healthy subjects.

Looking for a precursor of spontaneous Sleep Slow Oscillations in human sleep: The role of the sigma activity.

Sleep Slow Oscillations (SSOs), paradigmatic EEG markers of cortical bistability (alternation between cellular downstates and upstates), and sleep spindles, paradigmatic EEG markers of thalamic rhythm, are two hallmarks of sleeping brain. Selective thalamic lesions are reportedly associated to reductions of spindle activity and its spectrum ~14 Hz (sigma), and to alterations of SSO features. This apparent, parallel behavior suggests that thalamo-cortical entrainment favors cortical bistability.

Evolutionary aspects of self- and world consciousness in vertebrates.

Although most aspects of world and self-consciousness are inherently subjective, neuroscience studies in humans and non-human animals provide correlational and causative indices of specific links between brain activity and representation of the self and the world. In this article we review neuroanatomic, neurophysiological and neuropsychological data supporting the hypothesis that different levels of self and world representation in vertebrates rely upon (i) a "basal" subcortical system that includes brainstem, hypothalamus and central thalamic nuclei and that may underpin the primary (or anoetic) consciousness likely present in all vertebrates; and (ii) a forebrain system that include the medial and lateral structures of the cerebral hemispheres and may sustain the most sophisticated forms of consciousness [e.g.

An EMG-Controlled Robotic Hand Exoskeleton for Bilateral Rehabilitation.

This paper presents a novel electromyography (EMG)-driven hand exoskeleton for bilateral rehabilitation of grasping in stroke. The developed hand exoskeleton was designed with two distinctive features: (a) kinematics with intrinsic adaptability to patient's hand size, and (b) free-palm and free-fingertip design, preserving the residual sensory perceptual capability of touch during assistance in grasping of real objects. In the envisaged bilateral training strategy, the patient's non paretic hand acted as guidance for the paretic hand in grasping tasks.

Illusory movements induced by tendon vibration in right- and left-handed people.

Frequency-specific vibratory stimulation of peripheral tendons induces an illusion of limb movement that may be useful for restoring proprioceptive information in people with sensorimotor disability. This potential application may be limited by inter- and intra-subject variability in the susceptibility to such an illusion, which may depend on a variety of factors. To explore the influence of stimulation parameters and participants' handedness on the movement illusion, we vibrated the right and left tendon of the biceps brachii in a group of right- and left-handed people with five stimulation frequencies (from 40 to 120 Hz in step of 20 Hz).

A case of post-traumatic minimally conscious state reversed by midazolam: Clinical aspects and neurophysiological correlates.

Purpose: We describe the case of a subject in a post-traumatic Minimally Conscious State (MCS) who retrieved full interaction with the environment after midazolam infusion. We studied EEG correlates of the "awakening reaction" in the different domains of frequency, time and cortical topography, along with the intrinsic connectivity within both the task-positive and the linguistic network.

Methods: EEG recorded before and after midazolam administration has been submitted to spectral power analysis, sLORETA analysis and intrinsic connectivity analysis within both functional networks.

How stressful are 105 days of isolation? Sleep EEG patterns and tonic cortisol in healthy volunteers simulating manned flight to Mars.

Spaceflights "environment" negatively affects sleep and its functions. Among the different causes promoting sleep alterations, such as circadian rhythms disruption and microgravity, stress is of great interest also for earth-based sleep medicine. This study aims to evaluate the relationships between stress related to social/environmental confinement and sleep in six healthy volunteers involved in the simulation of human flight to Mars (MARS500).

Spectral parameters modulation and source localization of blink-related alpha and low-beta oscillations differentiate minimally conscious state from vegetative state/unresponsive wakefulness syndrome.

Recently, the cortical source of blink-related delta oscillations (delta BROs) in resting healthy subjects has been localized in the posterior cingulate cortex/precuneus (PCC/PCu), one of the main core-hubs of the default-mode network. This has been interpreted as the electrophysiological signature of the automatic monitoring of the surrounding environment while subjects are immersed in self-reflecting mental activities. Although delta BROs were directly correlated to the degree of consciousness impairment in patients with disorders of consciousness, they failed to differentiate vegetative state/unresponsive wakefulness syndrome (VS/UWS) from minimally conscious state (MCS).