• dispositivo indossabile
• riabilitazione
• risposta elettrodermica

The work shown below takes its place about at the midpoint between the research that investigates the physiological response to specific external stimulus or to the induction of specific moods and the rehabilitation – supported by robotic systems or virtual reality based system – of the superior arm after cerebral damage.
The goal of this study is to find a meeting point between these two disciplines, putting the first one at the service of the second one, with the intent to adapt the actually in use systems not only to the physical capabilities of the user, but to his/her mood as well.
For this purpose it has been realized a sensing system that acquires, together with the gesture of the superior arm – and of the hand in particular – a physiological characteristic that has been admitted by the scientific community as a good indicator of the ANS activity: Skin Conductance. It is acquired by textile sensors, sent wirelessly to a computer and then processed.
After the observation of data obtained by tasks which included in a first time only movement and then movement together with physiological variation, various methods have been developed to allow distinguishing the movement artifact on the acquired signal. In this way it is possible to separate peaks generated by physiological response from those generated by movement. Successive studies could permit an appropriate characterization of recorded physiological variation in terms of stress level, or based on the patient’s mood; an application for the characterized variations would also be possible. In particular, characteristics extracted by physiological variation could be used for example to control the difficulty of rehabilitative tasks, which now is only related to the patient’s performance.
A system like the one showed above could also be easily used at home, using only the glove here presented, attached with its acquisition system and a personal computer. The costs of transport to the clinic, to hire somebody that assists the patient and accompanies him/her to the physician and the cost of the therapy itself are therefore avoided.
Furthermore, some studies have shown that virtual reality based rehabilitation permits to reach results similar to those by robotic or conventional therapy; differences are in the prices: robotic therapy can cost from 13.000 to 15.000 EUR a year, whereas a system like the one here proposed has a total cost inferior than 1.000 EUR.
In the following chapters are reported: an introduction, that is a review about the state of art; the description of the device, of the used protocols and the executed tasks; the processing methods; the obtained results and the discussion.