Francesca Lunardini

Politecnico di Milano | Polimi · Department of Electronics, Information, and Bioengineering

The presence of involuntary, non-functional jaw muscle activity (NFJMA) has not yet been assessed in patients with disorders of consciousness (DOC), although the presence of bruxism and other forms of movement disorders involving facial muscles is probably more frequent than believed. In this work, we evaluated twenty-two prolonged or chronic DOC p...

Introduction: Since the uptake of digitizers, quantitative spiral drawing assessment allowed gaining insight into motor impairments related to Parkinson's disease. However, the reduced naturalness of the gesture and the poor user-friendliness of the data acquisition hamper the adoption of such technologies in the clinical practice. To overcome suc...

Handwriting learning delays should be addressed early to prevent their exacerbation and long-lasting consequences on whole children’s lives. Ideally, proper training should start even before learning how to write. This work presents a novel method to disclose potential handwriting problems, from a pre-literacy stage, based on drawings instead of wo...

Personal computers, tablets, and smartphones may support older adults' engagement when people are required to stay home and opportunities to engage in meaningful activities are reduced during the COVID-19 period. This study aims to screen older adults’ technology-use characteristics across social, leisure, and education domains during the COVID-19...

Background Little is known about the perceived impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdown measures on young patients with tic disorders. Previous studies focused on clinician and parent ratings of tic severity, whereas the only international self-report data are available for adult populations. We present the first findings from a case...

The integration of Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) frameworks with Socially Assistive Robots (SARs) has proven useful for monitoring and assisting older adults in their own home. However, the difficulties associated with long-term deployments in real-world complex environments are still highly under-explored. In this work, we first present the MoveCa...

Handwriting skills could be highly impaired in patients affected by Parkinson's disease (PD), and for this reason its analysis had always been considered relevant. In handwriting assessment, Archimedes spiral drawing is one of the most proposed tasks, due to its peculiar shape and ease of execution. In the last decades, digitizing tablets had been...

We conducted a cross-sectional study to compare the impact of social distancing and lifestyle changes that occurred during Corona Virus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) lockdown on children and adolescents with and without Neurodevelopmental Disorders (NDDs). An online questionnaire was administered in order to investigate the effects of NDD condition, soci...

Dysgraphia is a Learning Disability that prevents from mastering handwriting. It is belatedly diagnosed, with negative consequences on children's life. To anticipate Dysgraphia screening to a pre-literacy age, we present Play-Draw-Write, a tablet-based application designed to assess handwriting-related features, starting from drawing. It focuses on...

Background Early detection of gait impairments in older adults allows the early uncovering of fall risk and/or cognitive deficits, resulting in timely interventions. Dual-task paradigms have been shown to be more sensitive than single-task conditions for the detection of subtle yet relevant gait impairments. Research question Can a system - encomp...

Objective: We present the development of a novel smart ink pen instrumented with force and motion sensors designed for the quantitative and ecological assessment of daily-life handwriting. This work aims at testing the pen’s sensors and algorithms, and the use of the smart pen to detect age-related changes of writing and tremor parameters during da...

Background: Dementia is a major and growing health problem, and early diagnosis is key to its management. Objective: With the ultimate goal of providing a monitoring tool that could be used to support the screening for cognitive decline, this study aims to develop a supervised, digitized version of 2 neuropsychological tests: Trail Making Test a...

Background Difficulties in handwriting, such as dysgraphia, impact several aspects of a child’s everyday life. Current methodologies for the detection of such difficulties in children have the following three main weaknesses: (1) they are prone to subjective evaluation; (2) they can be administered only when handwriting is mastered, thus delaying t...

As Europe sees its population aging dramatically, Assisted Daily Living for the elderly becomes a more and more important and relevant research topic. The Movecare Project focuses on this topic by integrating a robotic platform, an IoT system, and an activity center to provide assistance, suggestions of activities and transparent monitoring to user...

Failing to master handwriting, as in the case of Dysgraphia, has negative consequences on children’s lives. Unfortunately, Dysgraphia diagnosis is delayed and not easily achievable. Thus, the aim of this work is to propose a valid tool to anticipate Dysgraphia screening at a preliteracy age. We developed a tablet application to analyze characterist...

The analysis of the writing gesture has been successfully investigated in the diagnosis of age-related diseases, but the current technologies and methods still do not allow the ecological daily monitoring of handwriting, mostly because they rely on standardized writing protocols. In this study, we first designed and validated a novel electronic ink...

BACKGROUND Difficulties in handwriting, such as dysgraphia, impact several aspects of a child’s everyday life. Current methodologies for the detection of such difficulties in children have the following three main weaknesses: (1) they are prone to subjective evaluation; (2) they can be administered only when handwriting is mastered, thus delaying t...

BACKGROUND Dementia is a major and growing health problem and early diagnosis is key. OBJECTIVE With the ultimate goal of providing a monitoring tool that could be of support in the screening for cognitive decline, we developed a supervised digitized version of two neuropsychological tests: Trail Making Test and Bells Test. The system consists in...

Telemonitoring is one of the most expedient answers to the strong need for preventive care imposed by the rapidly aging society. We propose an innovative solution to the detection of early signs of frailty by presenting a serious game controlled by a smart sensorized soft plastic ball, designed to achieve continuous home-based monitoring of muscle...

Background: This study is aimed at better understanding the role of a wearable and silent ElectroMyoGraphy-based biofeedback on motor learning in children and adolescents with primary and secondary dystonia. Methods: A crossover study with a wash-out period of at least 1 week was designed; the device provides the patient with a vibration proport...

Handwriting is a complex gesture whose monitoring can disclose age-related modifications or the presence of frailty conditions throughout lifespan. An important biomarker that has the potential to detect subtle yet relevant changes in motor tasks is the Speed-Accuracy tradeoff (SAT). Due to the complexity of handwriting, SAT still lacks a quantitat...

Android robots that resemble humans closely, but not perfectly, can provoke negative feelings of dislike and eeriness in humans (the “Uncanny Valley” effect). We investigated whether category confusion between the perceptual categories of “robot” and “human” contributes to Uncanny Valley aversion. Using a novel, validated corpus of 182 images of re...

In the context of sensor-based human-robot interaction, a particularly promising solution is represented by myoelectric control schemes based on synergy-derived signals. We developed and tested on healthy subjects a synergy-based control to achieve simultaneous, continuous actuation of three degrees of freedom of a humanoid robot, while performing...

Android robots that are close, but imperfect, likenesses of humans can provoke negative feelings of dislike and eeriness in humans (“Uncanny Valley” effect). We investigated whether category confusion between the perceptual categories of “robot” and “human” contributes to Uncanny Valley aversion. Using a novel, validated corpus of 182 images of rea...

Grip Strength reduction is a marker of the age-related functional decline. The present work developed an exergame to continuously and transparently monitor handgrip strength and endurance in older persons. The game was tested on ten young adults reporting positive results, both in terms of usability and correlation with clinical standards, thus rep...

The ageing of the population deeply impacts on the social costs relative to health care. The use of modern technologies is one of the most promising approaches, under current study, to reduce such impact. In this demonstration, we propose a framework that can be employed for at-home assessment of Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI). It is composed by a...

We tested the ability of a synergy-based myocontrol scheme to achieve simultaneous, continuous control of two degrees of freedom (DOFs) of a robotic arm that reproduces the child’s movement (or intention of movement), using muscle synergies extracted from muscles recorded during both isometric contractions and unconstrained flexion-extension moveme...

One of the implications of aging population is the increasing need for services for elderly people, with an emphasis on earlier diagnosis and effective interventions promoting an active and healthy aging process. To face this need, the MoveCare Project develops and field-tests an innovative multi- actor platform that integrates a robotic system...

Childhood dystonia is a movement disorder characterized by muscle overflow and variability. This is the first study that investigates upper limb muscle synergies in childhood dystonia with the twofold aim of deepening the understanding of neuromotor dysfunctions and paving the way to possible synergy-based myocontrol interfaces suitable for this ne...

Understanding how the CNS copes with the redundancy of the musculoskeletal system is a central aim in motor neuroscience and has important implications in the clinical scenario. A long-standing idea hypothesis is that motor control may be simplified by a modular organization, in which several a few muscle synergies are used to organize muscles in f...

Cerebral palsy (CP) is the most common motor disorder of childhood. It is characterized by abnormal muscle tone and is caused by a nonprogressive injury to the developing brain. The hallmark of abnormal posture and movement occurs as the child develops fundamental motor skills. Thus, it is critical to make opportunities for infants and young childr...

EMG-Based Biofeedback to Improve Motor Control in Children with Dystonia The scarcity of effective treatment options for children with dystonia represents an important clinical challenge. In this framework, biofeedback training is a promising non-invasive treatment candidate. Indeed, rehabilitation tools able to provide augmented sensory informatio...

To tackle the limits of the literature investigating biofeedback training in children with secondary dystonia, the current study employs a wearable and silent EMG-based biofeedback device that aims at improving control over the impaired muscle by providing the patient with a vibration proportional to muscle activation. The device is tested on two c...

Muscle synergies are hypothesized to represent motor modules recruited by the nervous system to flexibly perform subtasks necessary to achieve movement. Muscle synergy analysis may offer a better view of the neural structure underlying motor behaviors and how they change in motor deficits and rehabilitation. The aim of this study is to investigate...

Background Even if movement abnormalities in dystonia are obvious on observation-based examinations, objective measures to characterize dystonia and to gain insights into its pathophysiology are still strongly needed. We hypothesize that motor abnormalities in childhood dystonia are partially due to the inability to suppress involuntary variable mu...

Motor speed and accuracy are both affected in childhood dystonia. Thus, deriving a speed-accuracy function is an important metric for assessing motor impairments in dystonia. Previous work in dystonia studied the speed-accuracy trade-off during point-to-point tasks. To achieve a more relevant measurement of functional abilities in dystonia, the pre...

In this study, we test the feasibility of the synergy-based approach for application in the realistic and clinically-oriented framework of multi-DOF robotic control. We developed and tested online, on ten able-bodied subjects, a semi-supervised method to achieve simultaneous, continuous control of two DOFs of a robotic arm, using muscle synergies e...

Dystonia has been associated with injury to the basal ganglia, in particular to the putamen and globus pallidus, even if there is evidence that other brain areas including cerebellum, brainstem, or sensory cortex can be causes of dystonia. Although dystonia is regarded as a movement disorders, several sensory phenomena occur. This suggests a dysfun...