Electropneumatic platform for a cognitive approach in rehabilitation of hemiplegic patients

The authors present a therapeutic tool, which aims to be a help in the cognitive-based rehabilitative treatment of hemiplegic patients. The system provides visual biofeedback patterns and could be used starting from an early stage of the treatment when no voluntary control is available. Ten normal and six hemiplegics were tested; at the end of each trial a symmetry index has been calculated on the basis of the recorded data. The scattergram shows the expected difference between normal and hemiplegic patients. Clearly, this is only the starting point; any conclusion about the effectiveness of the platform can only be obtained from a long-term study, where a set of patients who use the platform are compared with another set who follow a more traditional approach. Such studies are now in hand and will lead ultimately to an optimised set of fully automatic therapeutic protocols.