Kinect V2 implementation and testing of the reaching performance scale for motor evaluation of patients with neurological impairment.

Automated procedures for neurological patients' motor evaluation may take advantage of the coupling between clinical scales and motion tracking devices to provide affordable, quantified and reliable assessment to be used in clinics, in surgeries and domestic environment. In this study, 20 post-stroke patients performed frontal reaching movements with their more affected limb, and a physician administered the Reaching Performance Scale (RPS) to assess motor functionality. At the same time, patients' kinematics were recorded with the Kinect V2 sensor.

Kinect V2 Performance Assessment in Daily-Life Gestures: Cohort Study on Healthy Subjects for a Reference Database for Automated Instrumental Evaluations on Neurological Patients.

Background: The increase of sanitary costs related to poststroke rehabilitation requires new sustainable and cost-effective strategies for promoting autonomous and dehospitalized motor training. In the Riprendo@Home and Future Home for Future Communities research projects, the promising approach of introducing low-cost technologies that promote home rehabilitation is exploited. In order to provide reliable evaluation of patients, a reference database of healthy people's performances is required and should consider variability related to healthy people performances.

Muscle Synergies-Based Characterization and Clustering of Poststroke Patients in Reaching Movements.

Background: A deep characterization of neurological patients is a crucial step for a detailed knowledge of the pathology and maximal exploitation and customization of the rehabilitation therapy. The muscle synergies analysis was designed to investigate how muscles coactivate and how their eliciting commands change in time during movement production. Few studies investigated the value of muscle synergies for the characterization of neurological patients before rehabilitation therapies.

Modularising ontology and designing inference patterns to personalise health condition assessment: the case of obesity.

Background: The public health initiatives for obesity prevention are increasingly exploiting the advantages of smart technologies that can register various kinds of data related to physical, physiological, and behavioural conditions. Since individual features and habits vary among people, the design of appropriate intervention strategies for motivating changes in behavioural patterns towards a healthy lifestyle requires the interpretation and integration of collected information, while considering individual profiles in a personalised manner. The ontology-based modelling is recognised as a promising approach in facing the interoperability and integration of heterogeneous information related to characterisation of personal profiles.

Normative Data for an Instrumental Assessment of the Upper-Limb Functionality.

Upper-limb movement analysis is important to monitor objectively rehabilitation interventions, contributing to improving the overall treatments outcomes. Simple, fast, easy-to-use, and applicable methods are required to allow routinely functional evaluation of patients with different pathologies and clinical conditions. This paper describes the Reaching and Hand-to-Mouth Evaluation Method, a fast procedure to assess the upper-limb motor control and functional ability, providing a set of normative data from 42 healthy subjects of different ages, evaluated for both the dominant and the nondominant limb motor performance.

SafeNet: a methodology for integrating general-purpose unsafe devices in safe-robot rehabilitation systems.

Robot-assisted neurorehabilitation often involves networked systems of sensors ("sensory rooms") and powerful devices in physical interaction with weak users. Safety is unquestionably a primary concern. Some lightweight robot platforms and devices designed on purpose include safety properties using redundant sensors or intrinsic safety design (e.