Alessandro Tognetti

University of Pisa | UNIPI · Department of Information Engineering

Brugada Syndrome (BrS) is a primary electrical epicardial disease characterized by ST-segment elevation followed by a negative T-wave in the right precordial leads on the surface electrocardiogram (ECG), also known as the ‘type 1’ ECG pattern. The risk stratification of asymptomatic individuals with spontaneous type 1 ECG pattern remains challengin...

Brugada syndrome (BrS) is a cardiac electrophysiological disease with unknown etiology, associated with sudden cardiac death. Symptomatic patients are treated with implanted cardiac defibrillator, but no risk stratification strategy is effective in patients that are at low to medium arrhythmic risk. Cardiac computational modeling is an emerging too...

Background Catheter ablation is a cornerstone treatment for scar related post-infarction ventricular arrhythmias. Functional substrate driven ablation strategies guided by local activation time (LAT) mapping have been proven as efficient and effective approaches, especially when dealing with large scar areas. In-silico electrophysiological modeling...

Assessing mobility in daily life can provide significant insights into several clinical conditions, such as Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD). In this paper, we present a comprehensive analysis of wearable devices’ performance in gait speed estimation and explore optimal device combinations for everyday use. Using data collected from sma...

In the last years, commercial smartwatches have gained popularity as non-invasive and wearable devices to be exploited for the monitoring of the cardiovascular system in daily-life settings. However, their reliability is still unclear. In this preliminary study, we evaluated the accuracy of heart rate (HR) and HR variability (HRV) estimates obtaine...

In this work, we report on the application of a closed-loop system, composed of a 2D reaction-diffusion heart model and a pace-maker model, for assessing pacemaker-heart interactions. To demonstrate the potential of our approach, we replicated a clinical case report in which a ventricular pacing-minimizing strategy promoted the onset of Pacemaker-M...

Brugada syndrome (BrS) is a primarily electrical epicardial disease that increases the risk of sudden cardiac death. Arrhythmic events in BrS originate from the BrS substrate, located in the right ventricular outflow tract. Risk stratification in BrS patients is still controversial, with several models that have been recently proposed, especially f...

Precision and personalized medicine is an advanced approach to healthcare that involves the use of smart technologies to collect population-wise data. It aims to empower clinicians to predict the most effective treatment for patients and to improve routine medical and public health practice. The potential clinical benefits of advancing precision an...

Indoor short-range localization is crucial in many Industry 4.0 applications. Production monitoring for assembly lines, for instance, requires fine-grained positioning for parts or goods in order to keep track of the production process and the stations traversed by each product. Due to the unavailability of the Global Positioning System (GPS) for i...

This manuscript presents a novel finite difference method to solve cardiac bidomain equations in anatomical models of the heart. The proposed method employs a smoothed boundary approach that represents the boundaries between the heart and the surrounding medium as a spatially diffuse interface of finite thickness. The bidomain boundary conditions a...

BACKGROUND:The COVID-19 pandemic has increased the impact and spread of mental illness and made health services difficult to access, hence the need for remote, pervasive forms of mental health monitoring. Digital Phenotyping is a new approach that aims to use the measures extracted from spontaneous interactions with smartphones (e.g., screen touche...

Background: The COVID-19 pandemic has increased the impact and spread of mental illness and made health services difficult to access; therefore, there is a need for remote, pervasive forms of mental health monitoring. Digital phenotyping is a new approach that uses measures extracted from spontaneous interactions with smartphones (eg, screen touche...

In this work, we present a computational study of the Brugada Syndrome (BrS) phenotype aimed at investigating the main factors contributing to the development of arrhythmias. We developed a model that incorporated a BrS substrate within a region resembling the right ventricular outflow tract (RVOT) in a three-dimensional anisotropic ventricular car...

Breath rate is an important vital sign for monitoring the well-being and detecting underlying illnesses related to the respiratory system. The spirometer is widely used for evaluating the health of the respiratory system by measuring lung capacity and respiration rate. Although this test yields accurate results, however, it is significantly inconve...

Total sleep deprivation (TSD) has a major impact on sustained attention as reported by previous studies that have investigated effects of TSD, however by using classical neuropsychological tests that lack ecological validity. To study the effects of TSD on daily-life activities, we carried out an ecological evaluation of sustained attention using...

We present a transmurally heterogeneous phe-nomenological model of ventricular tissue that is designed to reproduce the most important features of action potential prop-agation of endocardial, midmyocardial, and epicardial tissue. Our model consists of only 3 variables and 20 parameters. Therefore, it is highly computational efficient and easy to f...

Brugada Syndrome is a form of idiopathic ventricular fibrillation, to date there is no definitive theory about how ventricular fibrillation is initiated or its substrate. Starting from the clinical observation that cardiac episodes are more frequent at rest, we developed a model in order to study the effect of cardiac frequency on reentrant activit...

A sensorized face mask could be a useful tool in the case of a viral pandemic event, as well as the Covid-19 emergency. In the context of the proposed project "RESPIRE", we have developed a "Smart-Mask" able to collect the signal patterns of body temperature, respiration, and symptoms such as cough, through a set of textile sensors. The signals hav...

In this work, we reported a computational study to quantitatively determine the individual contributions of three candidate arrhythmic factors associated with Brugada Syndrome. In particular, we focused our analysis on the role of structural abnormalities, dispersion of repolarization, and size of the diseased region. We developed a human phenomeno...

The present work introduces ShoulPhy: a digital application, which includes a rehabilitation protocol for the treatment of shoulder impingement syndrome (SIS). ShoulPhy, short for Shoulder Physiotherapy enables the development of a patient-centred physiotherapy program and the remote monitoring of the patient’s adherence to the program, both in the...

Monitoring of the breath rate is important for assessment of patients' health condition, sleep quality, sports monitoring, operational health, safety and early detection of potential serious respiratory system infections. Despite the need for continuous respiratory rate (RR) monitoring, wearable RR sensors are highly demanded in the relevant applic...

This work reports an innovative framework toward the practical implementation of tactile sensors based on electrical impedance tomography. Particularly, we tested our framework on the development of a piezoresistive insole-shaped sensor prototype. Our approach couples the implementation of the forward model through a physics-based general purpose F...

We describe the development and preliminary evaluation of an innovative low-cost wearable device for gait analysis. We have developed a sensorized sock equipped with 32 piezoresistive textile-based sensors integrated in the heel and metatarsal areas for the detection of signals associated with the contact pressures generated during walking phases....

The purpose of this manuscript is to develop a reaction-diffusion heart model for closed-loop evaluation of heart-pacemaker interaction, and to provide a hardware setup for the implementation of the closed-loop system. The heart model, implemented on a workstation, is based on the cardiac monodomain formulation and a phenomenological model of cardi...

We present a new phenomenological model of human ventricular epicardial cells and we test its reentry dynamics. The model is derived from the Rogers-McCulloch formulation of the FitzHugh-Nagumo equations and represents the total ionic current divided into three contributions corresponding to the excitatory, recovery and transient outward currents....

Surgeons are workers that are particularly prone to the development of musculoskeletal disorders. Recent advances in surgical interventions, such as laparoscopic procedures, have caused a worsening of the scenario, given the harmful static postures that have to be kept for long periods. In this paper, we present a sensor-based platform specifically...

According to current trends in healthcare sensing technologies, we describe a textile-based pressure sensing matrix that can be integrated in the mattress of a smart bed to characterize sleeping posture/movement of a subject and to extract breathing activity. The pressure mapping layer is developed as a matrix of 195 piezoresistive sensors, it is e...

Continuous heart monitoring is essential for early detection and diagnosis of cardiovascular diseases, which are key factors for the evaluation of health status in the general population. Therefore, in the future, it will be increasingly important to develop unobtrusive and transparent cardiac monitoring technologies for the population. The possibl...

Biomedical systems that aim at monitoring parameters over a long period of time will require non-invasive wearable devices. A wide range of applications, including continuous workers monitoring or daily monitoring of patients, is expected to exploit wearable devices, each one characterized by different requirements. Such devices will adopt a design...

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Sleep is a one of the most important activity for maintaining the health and well-being of each subject. In order to monitor continuously the quality of sleep of the general population in non-invasively way, we developed an innovative sensorized “smart” mattress (SmartBed). SmartBed is equipped with sensors to detect environmental and subject-relat...

The individual experience of inadequate or insufficient sleep is one of the most common health issues in the industrialized world. The 65% of Italian population reports disturbed sleep experiences, while chronic sleep disorders affect about 10% of the population. The people with inadequate and unsatisfactory sleep often suffers drowsiness during th...

We developed a finite element model of the electrical activity of the whole heart embedded in the torso that is proposed as an useful tool to simulate myocardial ischemia and cardiac pacing. The electrical activity of the cardiac tissue is reproduced with a bidomain model incorporated with the FitzHugh-Nagumo equations. The finite element model is...

The increasing capability of computing power and mobile graphics has made possible the release of self-contained augmented reality (AR) headsets featuring efficient head-anchored tracking solutions. Ego motion estimation based on well-established infrared tracking of markers ensures sufficient accuracy and robustness. Unfortunately, wearable visibl...

Sleep disorders are common health problems in industrialized societies and may be caused by underlying health issues. Current methods to assess the quality of sleep are invasive and not suitable for continuous monitoring in real world contexts. We have developed a smart sensing solution for non invasive sleep monitoring specifically conceived for t...

We developed a closed-loop model of cardiac stimulation using a finite element model of the whole-heart embedded in the torso that is proposed as an useful tool for pacemaker design and testing. The electrical activity of the cardiac tissue is reproduced with a bidomain model incorporated with the FitzHugh-Nagumo equations. The finite element model...

Monitoring chemical and physical properties of seawater is important to assess the status and predict future changes of marine environment. Among possible parameters, pH and temperature are frequently measured since they directly affect chemical and biological systems. Seawater assessment, conventionally performed in situ, is labour intensive and t...

Breast cancer is the most commonly diagnosed cancer in women worldwide. Although targeted screening programs using mammography have facilitated earlier detection and improved treatment has resulted in a significant reduction in mortality, some negative aspects related to cost, the availability of trained staff, the duration of the procedure, and it...

We present the development of an innovative stretchable tactile sensor based on electrical impedance tomography (EIT) for applications in wearable robotics and rehabilitation. To extract the tactile information we exploit the electrical impedance tomography technique to reconstruct the local conductivity changes of a piezoresistive fabric. The EIT...

Technology advancements in wireless communication and embedded computing are fostering their evolution from standalone elements to smart objects seamlessly integrated in the broader context of the Internet of Things. In this context, wearable sensors represent the building block for new cyber-physical social systems, which aim at improving the well...

Wearable technology will revolutionize our lives in the years to come. [...]

Wearable sensors may enable the continuous monitoring of gait out of the clinic without requiring supervised tests and costly equipment. This paper investigates the use of a single wearable accelerometer to detect foot contact times and estimate temporal gait parameters (stride time, swing and stance duration). The experiments considered two possib...

Traditional electrical tomography tactile sensors consider the usage of the system’s finite element model. This approach brings disadvantages that jeopardise their applicability aspect and wide use. To address this limitation, the main thrust of this work is to present a method for touch position identification for an electrical tomography flexible...

The spatio-temporal parameters of gait can reveal early signs of medical conditions affecting motor ability, including the frailty syndrome and neurodegenerative diseases. This has brought increasing interest into the development of wearable-based systems to automatically estimate the most relevant gait parameters, such as stride time and the durat...

The aim of the present work is to introduce SHOULPHY: a digital application, which includes a rehabilitation protocol for the treatment of Shoulder Impingement Syndrome (SIS). SHOULPHY, short for Shoulder Physiotherapy, represents a valid contribute for physicians allowing for the creation of a patient-centred physiotherapic program and remote moni...

In this work we present the development and preliminary testing of a wearable-technology-enabled platform for the remote rehabilitation of a large number of shoulder muscular-skeletal diseases. The presented system (Shoulphy) is conceived to lead and assess the patient, wearing a minimal set of inertial sensors, through personalized physical rehabi...

Thanks to the new advanced tools and the innovative methods to image deep in the brain at cell resolution, neuroanatomy is quickly redefining its protocols for quantitatively studying neurons in their own three-dimensional arrangement. The huge amount of data generated has to be managed and shared among labs: this need has led us to develop DataBra...

It is increasingly recognized that stress has negative effects on growing numbers of people. Stress assessment is a complex issue, but different studies have shown that monitoring user psychophysiological parameter during daily life can be greatly helpful in stress evaluation. In this context, the European Collaborative Project INTERSTRESS is aimed...

In recent years, wearability has become a new fundamental requirement for an effective and lightweight design of human-robot interfaces. Among the different application fields, robotic teleoperation represents the ideal scenario that can largely benefit from wearability to reduce constraints to the human workspace (acting as a master) and enable an...

This paper presents a methodology for movement recognition in hand-assisted laparoscopic surgery using a textile-based sensing glove. The aim is to recognize the commands given by the surgeon’s hand inside the patient’s abdominal cavity in order to guide a collaborative robot. The glove, which incorporates piezoresistive sensors, continuously captu...

This paper presents a system developed for the assistance with a collaborative robot in hand-assisted laparoscopic surgery (HALS). The system includes a sensing glove with piezoresistive sensors which capture continuously the flexion degree of the surgeon's fingers. These data are analyzed using an algorithm that detects and recognize the selected...

The past thirty years have seen increasingly rapid advances in the field of laparoscopic surgery, in part because of the use of robots. A well-known example is the da Vinci surgical system. However, far too little attention has been paid to Hand Assisted Laparoscopic Surgery (HALS), a surgery in which the surgeon introduces the non-dominant hand in...

Electrical Impedance Tomography (EIT) is a medical imaging technique that has been recently used to realize stretchable pressure sensors. In this method, voltage measurements are taken at electrodes placed at the boundary of the sensor and are used to reconstruct an image of the applied touch pressure points. The drawback with EIT-based sensors, ho...

In this work, we present an unobtrusive and non-invasive perception framework based on the synergy between two main acquisition systems: the Touch-Me Pad, consisting of two electronic patches for physiological signal extraction and processing; and the Scene Analyzer, a visual-auditory perception system specifically designed for the detection of soc...