Neurorehabilitation aims at motor recovery after a nervous system injury. Compared to other types of rehabilitation, the mechanisms underlying the recovery and the effectiveness of treatments are often not completely unraveled. Neuromotor rehabilitation plays a crucial role in the reduction of disability. Although robotics-based interventions have shown great potential, these solutions are still complex and expensive, which limits their widespread adoption. At the same time, low-cost systems exploiting simple bodyweight exercises, albeit adopting virtual reality (VR) and motion-tracking tools, do not usually go beyond the conventional movement/task-oriented exercises.
The VISIONARY project aims at bringing bodyweight neuromotor rehabilitation beyond the conventional approaches, by studying the impact of advanced visual feedback in exercises featuring VR, for the improvement of the neural control of upper-limb movements. The project aims to conceive a new generation of bidirectional body-computer interfaces in which the information collected in real-time about upper-limb biomechanics and muscular activity becomes a hidden actuator of the controlled virtual object in the VR. This approach will project each person in a virtual scenario characterized by physical laws, unknown to the participant, applied to the controlled object guiding to achieve the correct execution of the exercise and targeting specific changes of individual motor and muscle strategies. If opportunely programmed, these interfaces could help reshape compensatory motor strategies normally adopted to contrast the impairment. This is particularly relevant in unsupervised rehabilitation, where corrections and feedback must be provided by automatic systems.