Neuro-Gerontechnologies: Applications and Opportunities

μ-band desynchronization in the contralateral central and central-parietal areas predicts proprioceptive acuity

“…Additionally, the position matching task could be used in future to investigate the effects of an attentional load on μ desynchronization ( Hobson and Bishop, 2016 ), such as what happens during the phases that follows the movement offsets here analyzed (i.e., “target position” and “matching position” phases) ( Figure 1 ), when memory work is required. A deeper knowledge of the neural basis underlying proprioception will help understand the mechanisms that lead to its deterioration with age ( Barresi et al, 2022 ) or in presence of neurological diseases ( De Santis et al, 2015 ). Nonetheless, the method here proposed appears to be a possible general framework, which can be suitable for a comprehensive investigation of sensorimotor integration.…”

Digital Twins and Healthcare: Quick Overview and Human-Centric Perspectives

“…The reference to the pandemic is not casual: the stress experienced by the healthcare systems forced the scientific-technological community to propose novel ways for optimizing the allocation of resources among frail people at risk. This situation pushed the need of presenting solutions of sustainable and resilient healthcare based on decentralized services supported by approaches like Telemedicine and Telerehabilitation (including robotic systems), Digital Health and services of Connected Care, especially for older adults [69][70][71][72]. This situation unveiled the need of considering the complexity of these phenomena within wider frameworks like the One Digital Health to shape future technological ecosystems [73], starting with Smart Cities designed (and modeled through Digital Twins) for sustaining health and well-being through cost-effective solutions for countering public emergencies too [74].…”

“…Furthermore, another phone can help the remote expert to interact with the Phygital Twin without a fully immersive scenario, especially for focusing on specific details on the individual conditions. About the latter, the paper in [25] focused on neuroergonomics in HRI contexts with exemplary cases akin to Phygital Twins in fields like bionic prosthetics [95,96] and rehabilitation technologies [97], envisioning the generation of quantifiable indices of healthy and pathological conditions or response to treatments: digital biomarkers [98] becoming a "phygital biomarker" thanks to the informational components based on physical interactions that can be exploited by a clinician for evaluating the individual conditions [69]. Interestingly, novel frameworks considering dual Digital Twins representing patients and clinicians within a telerehabilitation setting already provides scenarios that can take advantage of this approach [72].…”

“…This may be the case of an assistive or rehabilitative device, or a home environment as a whole, especially for testing the appropriateness of introducing IoT devices [70] in terms of individual reactions (detected through data collected by means of distal and wearable sensors). Obviously, this would require a certain level of actuation in the Physical Twin, but this could become an important option for easing the activity of a remote clinician or researcher desiring to modify the surroundings of a frail person in order to evaluate their conditions or for anticipating the interventions to be adopted when certain symptoms initiate to occur [69]. Certainly, this approach can be used for evaluating medical devices too, especially (as in the example) robotic systems.…”

Beyond Digital Twins: Phygital Twins for Neuroergonomics in Human-Robot Interaction

“…Overall, these are just examples in a general virtual-real convergence trend (Tao and Zhang, 2017 ), like cyber-physical twins (Czwick and Anderl, 2020 ). This trend occurs in healthcare too (Gregory, 2022 ) about managing chronic conditions and predicting their progress or the therapeutic outcome (Voigt et al, 2021 ; Barresi et al, 2022 ). Furthermore, we must highlight how intrinsically phygital are the recent definitions of the metaverse, a digital world embracing cyber-physical systems and also DTs in its connection with the real world (Yoon et al, 2021 ).…”