Quantitative EEG and virtual reality to support post-stroke rehabilitation at home

Abstract

Post-stroke rehabilitation has an enormous impact on health services worldwide because of the high prevalence of stroke, in continuous growth due to the progressive population aging. Systems for neuro-motor rehabilitation at home can help reduce the economic burden of long lasting treatment in chronic post-stroke patients; however the efficacy of these systems in providing a correct and effective rehabilitation should be established. From this point of view, coupling home rehabilitation systems with quantitative EEG methodologies for objectively characterizing patients’ cerebral activity could be useful for the clinician to optimize the rehabilitation protocol and assess its efficacy. Moreover, the use of virtual/ augmented reality technologies could assist the patients during unsupervised rehabilitation by providing an empathic feedback to improve their adherence to the treatment. These two aspects were studied and implemented in RIPRENDO@home, a multidisciplinary project, aimed to develop an integrated technological platform oriented to home neurorehabilitation for stroke patients.