ETD

• EEG recordings
• healthy
• non-invasive
• Parkinson's disease
• vibrotactile gloves
• vibrotactile stimulation

The present thesis was developed in response to the growing need, emerged from an extensive literature review, for novel non-invasive, wearable, sensory-based approaches for Parkinson's disease. Existing wearable systems are typically symptom-based and designed primarily to attenuate motor impairments, often resulting in transient effects. However the neurophysiologocal mechanisms underlying the beneficial outcomes of these devices remain not fully understood. With a neuroscientifically-driven perspective, this work aimed at investigating whether vibrotactile stimulation delivered through a custom-designed wearable device could induce plastic changes at the cortical level. Thereby, a pair of vibrotactile gloves was developed to deliver specific temporal parameters hypothesized to modulate synaptic plasticity mechanisms. As a proof-of-concept preliminary study, electroencephalogram (EEG) recordings were acquired from three healthy participants. Two protocols were tested: a low-frequency stimulation at 1 Hz, hypothesized to induce Long Term Depression (LTD) and a high-frequency vibration at 10 Hz, hypothesized to induce Long Term Potentiation (LTP). Cortical responses to tactile stimuli were assessed before and after stimulation in order to evaluate protocol-dependent modulation of plasticity-related neural markers.