Ilaria Bortone and Lucia Billeci (Institute of Clinical Physiology, National Research Council (IFC-CNR), Pisa, Italy)
Assistive neuromotor rehabilitation through serious games and wearable sensors
(De 17h00 à 19h30 à l’Université Paris 8, salle C223)
Résumé :
The new global estimates establish rehabilitation as a critical strategy for Universal Health Coverage in the 21st century. Globally, 1 in 3 people today is estimated to be living with a health condition that benefits from rehabilitation (Rehabilitation). Rehabilitation is essential, along with prevention, promotion, treatment, and support, in addressing the full scope of health needs of a population, ensuring healthy lives, and promoting well-being for all at all ages. It becomes particularly true in the case of developmental disabilities that affect about 1 in 6 (17%) children aged 3-17 years. The causally and clinically heterogeneous nature of these conditions still represents an open issue: in fact, children reach milestones in how they play, learn, speak, behave, and move; thus, trying to rehabilitate a child is like trying to hit a moving target.
Treatment options are broad-ranging, but effective therapeutic options for these children often remain an unmet need. The use of new technologies in rehabilitation, such as serious games and wearable technologies, has gained increased interest over the last decade thanks to the possibility of personalized therapy and monitoring its effects.
The use of serious games in rehabilitation has been on the rise in recent years and they are used as either a main interventional tool or as an adjunct alongside conventional therapies. This is largely due to its virtue of being an electronic platform hence possessing game characteristics that facilitate patient progress. Wearable technologies can be used in rehabilitation in combination with serious games to monitor physiological and behavioral data such as activity levels or neurophysiological signals, to monitor the effect of the treatment and adapt it according to the progress of the child.
In our lecture, we will first provide an overview of serious games and wearable technology used in rehabilitation, with a special focus on childhood.
We will then focus on the presentation of a case study, which is the work done within the project TELOS “Tailored neurorehabilitation thErapy via multi-domain data anaLytics and adaptive seriOus games for children with cerebral palsy”, funded under the call “Bando Ricerca Salute 2018” of Tuscany Region, Italy, (CUP J52F20001040002). This project is focused on children with cerebral palsy and is aimed at developing new rehabilitation methods and tools, including a fully immersive Virtual Reality (VR) system with haptic feedback, in the form of adaptable Serious Games, to perform and monitor personalized and engaging rehabilitation treatment. The use of wearable technologies for the acquisition of physiological data, allows for to improve the effectiveness of intervention by continuously monitoring patients’ metrics through innovative sensors and data analysis techniques, aiming to tailor the ongoing therapy to patients’ needs and abilities.
We will also present some other research performed by our research group on the use of serious games and wearable technologies in neuropsychiatry, particularly in autism spectrum disorders (ASDs).
