Marco Laurino

Italian National Research Council | CNR · Institute of Clinical Physiology IFC

Introduction Average age of the workforce is constantly rising. Meanwhile, current evolutions in the workplace are characterized by an increase in the use of digital technologies, requiring greater cognitive skills and time flexibility. We designed a study to evaluate the wellbeing of workers over 50 years old, through assessment of work-ability, c...

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...

Introduction Cognitive functions play a crucial role in individual’s life since they represent the mental abilities necessary to perform any activity. During working life, having healthy cognitive functioning is essential for the proper performance of work, but it is especially crucial for preserving cognitive abilities and thus ensuring healthy co...

The positive effects of meditation on human wellbeing are indisputable, ranging from emotion regulation improvement to stress reduction and present-moment awareness enhancement. Changes in brain activity regulate and support these phenomena. However, the heterogeneity of meditation practices and their cultural background, as well as their poor cate...

Objective This observational study investigates workability and its associations with cognitive functioning, sleep quality and technostress among an older working population, also shedding light on potential differences between two occupational categories with different work schedules. Methods Workers aged over 50, employed in different working se...

The COVID-19 pandemic experience has highlighted the importance of developing general control principles to inform future pandemic preparedness based on the tension between the different control options, ranging from elimination to mitigation, and related costs. Similarly, during the COVID-19 pandemic, social distancing has been confirmed to be the...

Background Persons with specific phobias typically generalize the dangerousness of the phobic animal to all members of its species, possibly as a result of malfunctioning brain circuitry normally providing quick and dirty identification of evolutionary-relevant stimuli. An objective assessment of which perceptual features make an animal more or les...

Sleep is a physiological process characterized by a crucial interaction between behavioural and neurobiological aspects, thereby directly influencing mental functionality. The present work aims at providing an overview of the structure, topological distribution, and functions of the sleep slow oscillation (< 1 Hz), and at attempting to unveil how t...

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...

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...

In recent decades, the incidence of melanoma has grown rapidly. Hence, early diagnosis is crucial to improving clinical outcomes. Here, we propose and compare a classical image analysis-based machine learning method with a deep learning one to automatically classify benign vs. malignant dermoscopic skin lesion images. The same dataset of 25,122 pub...

Background Large changes in ageing population and in retirement age are increasing the number of older people in the workforce, raising many challenges for policymakers in promoting employment opportunities and health for older workers. In this respect, longitudinal assessments of workability, well-being perception and cognitive skills over time ma...

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...

Accidents at work are a major concern because of their social and economic impact. The causes are highly variable and often linked to risk behaviors that could be avoided, of which substance use is a prime example. The aim of this paper was to meta-analytically review the scientific literature on substance intake and its link to work-related accide...

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...

Medicine needs to move towards digital technology. ProAgeing app provides an important tool for improving and simplifying cognitive and psychological assessment. Clinical Relevance- The ProAgeing app could be used by clinicians to easily assess psychological and cognitive functioning in a user-friendly way.

Purpose Hypoparathyroidism (HypoPT) is a rare endocrine disease and conventional therapy is based on calcium and vitamin D analogues. Conventional therapy does not restore calcium homeostasis and patients complain with neuropsychological symptoms, which have been evaluated with nonspecific self-administered questionnaires. This study aims to evalua...

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....

Objective: Since many jobs imply driving, a relevant part of all road traffic crashes (RTC) is related to work. Statistics considering all crashes suggest that they are significantly associated with consumption of substances, but the root causes are not yet clear. The objective of the present paper was to systematically review the scientific liter...

Brain modulation of myocardial activity via the autonomic nervous system is increasingly well characterized. Conversely, how primary alterations in cardiac function, such as an intrinsic increase in heart rate or contractility, reverberate on brain signaling/adaptive behaviors - in a bottom-up modality - remains largely unclear. Mice with cardiac-s...

The central nervous system modulates heart function on a beat-to-beat basis via increasingly understood mechanisms. Conversely, whether and how humoral/functional cardiac variations shape brain activity and adaptive behavior remains unclear. This study shows that mice overexpressing adenylyl cyclase type 8 in myocytes (TGAC8), characterized by pers...

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...

Background: Increasing evidence links meteorological characteristics and air pollution to physiological responses during sports activities in urban areas with different traffic levels. Objective: The main objective of the Smart Healthy ENV (SHE, "Smart Monitoring Integrated System For A Healthy Urban Environment In Smart Cities") project was to...

Cognitive functions could be specifically altered but masked from the unspecific effect of workload, a common factor affecting cognitive functions that modulate peripheral outputs. To identify workload-related and specific, task-dependent components, physiological correlates of cognitive functioning were derived by studying 15 healthy volunteers pe...

Distinct cognitive functions are based on specific brain networks, but they are also affected by workload. The workload is a common factor affecting cognitive functioning that, by activating the Central Autonomic Network, modulates heart rate peripheral correlates of cognitive functioning. Based on these premises, we expected that the peripheral pa...

The prolonged lockdown imposed to contain the COrona VIrus Disease 19 COVID-19 pandemic prevented many people from direct contact with nature and greenspaces, raising alarms for a possible worsening of mental health. This study investigated the effectiveness of a simple and affordable remedy for improving psychological well-being, based on audio-vi...

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...

The prolonged lockdown imposed to contain the COVID-19 pandemic prevented many people from direct contact with nature and greenspaces, raising alarms for a possible worsening of mental health. This study investigates the effectiveness of a simple and affordable remedy for improving psychological well-being, based on audio-visual stimuli brought by...

Increasing incidence of skin cancer combined with a shortage of dermatopathologists has increased the workload of pathology departments worldwide. In addition, the high intraobserver and interobserver variability in the assessment of melanocytic skin lesions can result in underestimated or overestimated diagnosis of melanoma. Thus, the development...

The aim of this study is to ascertain whether the simultaneous measurement of hemoglobin O2 saturation (StO2) and dimension of venous leg ulcers (VLU) by Near Infrared Spectroscopy (NIRS) imaging can predict the healing course with protocols employing a conventional treatment alone or in combination with Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy (HBOT). NIRS 2D im...

We investigated changes of slow‐wave activity and sleep slow oscillations in the night following procedural learning boosted by reinforcement learning, and how these changes correlate with behavioural output. In the Task session, participants had to reach a visual target adapting cursor's movements to compensate an angular deviation introduced expe...

Everyday life is driven by a wide range of mental processes organized in cognitive, emotional and executive functions. The assessment of these abilities could be improved thanks to the rising of Virtual Reality (VR) technologies, that show a more ecological validity in respect to the artificial laboratory settings. Moreover, mental processes can be...

Post-operative hypoparathyroidism (PoHypo) is the most common cause of hypoparathyroidism and it is the result of accidental parathyroid removal/injury during neck surgery. The lack of PTH alters calcium homeostasis and patients are at risk of renal complications, bone involvement, infections and psychiatric syndromes. Conventional therapy, that in...

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...

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...

Aging is associated not only with the reduction of psychophysical and sensory capacities but also with different types of neurodegenerative disorders up to dementia manifestations. Aging in health and self-sufficiency is strictly dependent on the prevention and correction of factors that may determine reduction of psychophysical capacities (e.g., c...

K-complexes (KCs) and Sleep Slow Oscillations (SSOs) are the EEG expression of neuronal bistability during deeper stages Non-REM sleep. They are characterized by a deep negative deflection lasting about half-a-second, sustained, at the cortical level, by a widespread and synchronized neuronal hyperpolarization (i.e., electrical silence). The phase...

The introduction of mass vaccination against Varicella-Zoster-Virus (VZV) is being delayed in many European countries mainly because of the “fear” of a subsequent boom in natural herpes zoster (HZ) incidence in the first decades after the initiation of vaccination, caused by the expected decline in the protective effect of natural immunity boosting...

L’esperienza individuale di un sonno inadeguato o insufficiente è tra le condizioni più comuni del mondo industrializzato. Nella popolazione italiana, esperienze di sonno disturbato, non necessariamente di interesse clinico, sono riferite da circa il 65% della popolazione, mentre disturbi cronici del sonno interessano circa il 10% della popolazione...

Background: The psycho-physiological changes in brain-body interaction observed in most of meditative and relaxing practices rely on voluntary slowing down of breath frequency. However, the identification of mechanisms linking breath control to its psychophysiological effects is still under debate. This systematic review is aimed at unveiling psych...

Introduction: Inert gas narcosis is a syndrome complained by scuba divers performing deep dives while breathing air. It is characterized by a severe dysfunction of cognitive abilities, leading to dangerous or lethal behaviours. Since symptoms get worse with depth, the gradual growing of partial pressure of nitrogen (PpN2), critical from 39 metres (...

The coupling between respiration and neural activity within olfactory areas and hippocampus has recently been unambiguously demonstrated, its neurophysiological basis sustained by the well-assessed mechanical sensitivity of the olfactory epithelium. We herein hypothesize that this coupling reverberates to the whole brain, possibly modulating the su...

Purpose: The present study was aimed at investigating whether imatinib pharmacogenetics is related to its pharmacodynamics in patients affected by chronic myeloid leukemia. Methods: Through a procedure based on a sequence of classical statistics methods, we investigated the possible relationships between treatment efficacy/tolerability and combi...

A neoprene wetsuit is widely used to reduce thermal dispersion during diving. Recent observations have pointed out that elastic recoil of the wetsuit might have significant compressive effects, able to affect water and electrolyte homeostasis during both dry and immersed conditions. The aim of this study was to evaluate the possible cardiovascular...

Brain connectivity is associated to behavioral states (e.g. wake, sleep) and modified by physical activity although, to date, it is not clear which components (e.g. hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal axis hormones, cytokines) associated to the exercise are involved. In this pilot study, we used extreme exercise (UltraTriathlon) as a model to investigat...

Herpes zoster arises from reactivation of the varicella–zoster virus (VZV), causing varicella in children. As reactivation occurs when cell-mediated immunity (CMI) declines, and there is evidence that re-exposure to VZV boosts CMI, mass varicella immunization might increase the zoster burden, at least for some decades. Fear of this natural zoster b...

Background. In spite of the dramatically positive changes in the outcome of Chronic Myeloid Leukemia (CML) patients due to the introduction of imatinib, several aspects of both the pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics of this TKI remain unclear. In particular, the possible relations between patients' specific characteristics and the efficacy and t...