Stroke is an acute focal injury in the brain which results in functional deficits. Among them, deficits in motor control entail high impact on quality of life. Improving upper limb functioning through neurorehabilitation is a major therapeutic target in stroke rehabilitation to maximize patients' functional recovery and reduce long-term disability. Motor deficits such as muscle weakness and spasticity are commonly assessed by means of clinical scales. However, reliability and responsiveness issues limit the ability of these scales to monitor the motor recovery over time. In fact, clinical scales are often supported by objective measures derived from electromyography (EMG) or kinematics - which quantify motor actions from a functional point of view - or from electroencephalography (EEG) - to quantify motor impairment and recovery of the central nervous system.
Aim of the project is to develop a unified multimodal framework integrating EEG, EMG and kinematic signals, able to effectively evaluate the quality of upper limb movements in stroke patients. Such a tool would provide a set of multimodal indices describing and quantifying the upper limb motor impairment induced by the stroke and assessing the recovery induced by a motor rehabilitative intervention.
In the three years of the project, we plan to: i) characterize the motor impairment in stroke patients by means of multimodal features extracted from EEG, EMG and kinematics data; : ii) validate the proposed framework on a dataset collected from 20 healthy subjects and 20 stroke patients during the execution of simple and complex motor tasks; iii) use the measures of motor impairment to assess the recovery induced by a motor rehabilitation treatment supported by brain-computer interface in 20 stroke patients.
The success of the project will provide clinicians with an instrument aiding the planning of neurorehabilitation interventions and the timely monitoring of outcomes.
