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Project Summary

More than 50% of people with neurological disorders are fallers and about 14-65% fall at least once while in hospital, due to loss of balance. Neurological diseases limit levels of involvement and produce difficulties in the execution of daily living at home and social and productive activities by compromising the quality of life, as for patients with Parkinson's Disease, post-stroke symptoms, and severe Traumatic Brain Injury. Remarkably, imbalance, reduced mobility, and low daily physical activity may lead to decreased social participation, increased fear of falling, and invoke social isolation.

This project aims to develop a low-cost and easy-to-use technological device, called FAST (Fall Arrest SysTem), to prevent the risk of falling able to operate remotely and in real-time with the electronic medical record of each patient. The gait and postural dynamic stability assessment is obtained using inertial sensors combined with electroencephalography (EEG). EEG is a technique commonly used to study human brain activity.

We perform this clinical evaluation in patients suffering from neurological disorders, while performing three different motor tasks in an ecological scenario. Overall, these indices will permit predicting information about the risk of falling and orienting a tailored therapeutic neurorehabilitation strategy. FAST will integrate these indexes to facilitate clinicians to i) classify the risk of falling in real-time in patients with neurological disorders and ii) have an objective evaluation of the therapeutic outcome daily.

Our project relies on the evidence that current clinical assessment and rehabilitation practice often lack predictive power/reliability in estimating patients' independence in the ADL. Our mission is to provide the clinicians with a new generation of cost-effective prevention tools to tailor function-oriented neurorehabilitation protocols postural stability and gait disorders.

About us

FAST merges a world-class team of neuroscientists, bioengineers, and health professionals into a multidisciplinary research team oriented toward developing a new generation of technological devices. Our efforts favor the decision-making process in tailoring patient-centered rehabilitation strategies and improving the health service with direct benefits for the patients. Our products will make clinical evaluation better, faster, and more accurate in clinical and natural settings. As a multidisciplinary team, we can combine brain and body movement signals to obtain new predictive indices to assess and treat balance and gait disorders.

Our evidence-informed approach and scientific method lead us to implement brand-new strategies to optimize the recovery of cognitive-motor functions. We are confident that integrating our scientific-based systems with the clinical routine can improve the management of the health care service and accelerate the achievement of an objective and reliable telemonitoring and telerehabilitation process. Also, we firmly believe these strategies should be available for people of different ages and through all life course stages.

Our success is guaranteed by the tight and synergic collaboration between the members and the dynamic interplay of scientific and clinical expertise and previous experience. As a whole, we are representative of an innovative model of a rehabilitation team in which clinicians and researchers interact to inspire new perspectives to take care of the patients.

Our Team

Viviana Betti
Marco Iosa
Luigi Bianchi
Elena Bergamini
Giuseppe Vannozzi
Marco Tramontano
Valeria Belluscio
Yara El Rassi
Carmine Gelormini
Gabriele Marangon
Amaranta Soledad Orejel Bustos
Simona Vasta

Dissemination

The FAST team is glad to announce a forthcoming scientific event for the dissemination of new technological solutions to assess and treat the postural

Acknowledgement

Our Research group is one of the winners of Pre-Seed grant with Fall Arrest System (FAST) Project, the aims of the project is develop a low-cost and easy-to-use technological device to prevent the risk of falling able to operate remotely and in real-time with the electronic medical record of each patient (CUP: B85F2100143002).
Project no. A0375-2020-36724 of 28/10/2020 - POR FESR 2014/2020 - Public notice "Progetti Gruppi di Ricerca 2020" referred to in Det. N. G04014 of 13 April 2021 POR FESR Lazio 2014 - 2020 received a total grant of € 148,070.99. In addition to the Department of Psychology - Sapienza University of Rome - the Department of Civil Engineering and Computer Engineering, University of Rome Tor Vergata and the Department of Motor, Human and Health Sciences, University of Rome Foro Italico are part of the project.