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An automatic system for health data management and service report generation from Android OS smartphones was designed and implemented. QR Code is used as an identifier and a tracking tool for patients involved in rehabilitation treatments. The system was implemented both in a rehabilitation gymnasium and in a hospital ward. The experimental results highlight clearly an efficiency improvement in health...
Computerized systems employed for the analysis of cardiotocographic signals have become almost indispensable tools in fetal monitoring, for which evaluation of fetal heart rate signals plays a key role. Consequently to the diffusion of these systems, new software and complex signal processing methodologies are spreading and are gaining more and more interest. For testing the performances of new software...
Over the last decades, numerous and extensive research programs have been conducted in the field of robotic and proprioceptive rehabilitation. Robotic rehabilitation allows to record quantitative data about movement patterns that can help clinicians to better address the rehabilitation protocols providing information not captured using clinical measures, but the biome-chanical parameters proposed...
The equilibrium system needs the coordination of three subsystems: sensory, skeletal and central nervous system. The central nervous system (CNS) counteracts equilibrium perturbations by means of compensatory and anticipatory postural adjustments (APA). While compensatory adjustments deal with actual perturbations of balance, the APA precede perturbations. The APA consist of preprogrammed activation...
The segmentation of seemingly continuous movements into segments has been theorized for many years. These segments may be considered as “primitive” movements, or building blocks of more complex movements. The existence of these fragments, or sub-movements as they are called, has been supported by a wide range of studies over the past 100 years. Evidence for the existence of discrete sub-movements...
As has been frequently observed, single-joint movements are characterized by single-peaked, bell-shaped speed profiles. This findings and the tendency of natural movements to be characteristically smooth and graceful led to suggest that motor coordination can be mathematically modeled by postulating that voluntary movements are made, at least in the absence of any other overriding concerns, to be...
Foetal heart rate variability is widely considered an important parameter to assess foetal reactivity and wellbeing. Traditional approaches to analyze foetal heart rate and its variability, such as Time and Frequency Domain Analyses, have shown some limitations, due to their inability to highlight nonlinear dynamics potentially relevant. Hence, in the last decades, nonlinear analysis methods have...
The use of low-cost, commercial gaming systems for rehabilitation has received substantial attention in the last few years. Systems such as the Nintendo Wii encourage players to use natural actions to play games. The Wii systems has been integrated into rehabilitation programs and has gained the support of occupational therapists because it is easy to use and has a wide variety of games available...
Aim of this work is to describe a novel method for estimating overnight modulations of fractal dimension (FD) of R-R intervals (RRI), and to evaluate if these FD estimates may characterize different apnea types in sleep studies. Polysomnographies were performed in 10 patients with severe obstructive sleep apnea syndrome. Both obstructive (OS) and mixed (MX) apneas were found in all patients. The FD...
Heart rate variability (HRV) decrease has been described in patients with obstructive sleep apnea syndrome (OSAS). Nevertheless, time and frequency domain methods commonly used for HRV analysis are considered not completely reliable in case of respiratory and arrhythmic disorders. On the contrary, the nonlinear approach may supply powerful and promising tools to give a better insight of the autonomic...
Infantile Nystagmus Syndrome, or Congenital Nystagmus, is an ocular-motor disorder characterized by involuntary, conjugated and bilateral to and fro ocular oscillations. Good visual acuity in congenital nystagmus can be achieved during the foveation periods in which eye velocity slows down while the target image crosses the fovea. Visual acuity was found to be mainly dependent on the duration of the...
Foetal heart rate variability is considered an important parameter, capable to highlight foetal reactivity and wellbeing. Many studies focused their attention on foetal heart rate variability analysis, using different techniques both in time and frequency domain. Proposed parameters have shown some limitations, due to their inability to analyze nonlinear dynamics, involved in heart rate control and...
The analysis of heart rate variability is a tool to investigate the autonomic cardiac control and the well-functioning of the autonomic nervous system. The sympathetic and parasympathetic systems are the principle rapidly reacting systems that control heart and the methods usually employed are not sufficient alone to describe these dynamic changes. The integration of parameters derived from the non-linear...
Functional recovery of limb mobility of patients with spinal or cerebral injuries can take great advantage of the basic role played by sensorial and proprioceptive stimulations. On this base the Institute of Biomedical Problems of the Russian Academy of Sciences have recently developed the “Regent Suit” (RS), an experimental medical device derived from a suits worn by astronauts for therapeutical...
Arm reaching movements (ARM) are mainly used in rehabilitative settings, as robot mediated therapies, virtual reality and motion capture systems in exergaming. ARM typical consist of gaussian-like bell shaped velocity profile. No previous paper addressed in details their relationships with amplitude and speed of the movement and aim of the paper is to study existing correlations between quantitative...
The use of electrocardiogram as biometric has raised attention in the last decade and a wide variety of ECG features were explored to verify the feasibility of such a signal. In this work the authors aim to describe a simple template based approach to the electrocardiographic biometric identification using the morphology of individual's heartbeat. The developed algorithm was tested on different recordings...
Obstructive sleep apnea syndrome (OSAS) has been associated to impaired baroreflex sensitivity (BRS) which has recently been shown to be non-invasively assessed by heart rate turbulence (HRT) analysis. Although HRT seems to be better suited than traditional heart rate variability indexes for autonomic assessment in presence of respiratory and arrhythmic disorders, very few papers addressed its evaluation...
Although heart rate variability (HRV) decreasing has been usually described in obstructive sleep apnea syndrome (OSAS), some studies have recently questioned the validity of spectral HRV analysis in presence of respiratory and arrhythmic disorders. Fractal analysis of HRV is an emerging nonlinear technique overcoming these limitations and allowing short term HRV assessment during hypo/apnea phases...
One of the most appealing features of robot-assisted-therapy (RMT) consists in the possibility to quantify the performances of the rehabilitation task proposed to the patient. The analysis of kinematics indexes, providing quantitative information about movement patterns that is not captured using clinical measures, could be used as reliable outcome measures in clinical upper limb rehabilitative settings...
Cardiovascular oscillations following spontaneous ventricular premature complexes (VPC) are described by the so-called heart rate turbulence (HRT) onset (TO) and slope (TS). Since HRT is a marker of baroreflex sensitivity, it can be hypothesized to be affected by the preceding VPC sympatovagal balance (pHF). The aim of this study is to investigate the relationship between HRT parameters and pHF in...
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