Boosting physical and psychological well-being in rehabilitation through cognitive technologies preliminary results

Orthopaedic rehabilitation is a hot topic since the increasing age of the population in western countries implies that more and more people require invasive and inabilitating orthopaedic surgery, such as knee substitution, in order to recover physical functionality, autonomy and quality of life. Consequently, it's fundamental to test rehabilitation treatment able to increase efficacy and reliability of treatment, both with the aim to improve outcomes and decrease days of hospital stay. In this sense, Neurocognitive driven technology may have a great impact in this field. Starting by the paradigm of Action Observation Treatment, we have designed a pilot study using a 3D environment and wearable bio-sensors to boost rehabilitation in collaboration with an important orthopaedic hospital in Milan, Italy. We hypothized that the use of a 3D environment would decrease the time required for the recovery of motor functionality with respect to a 2D environment or to a standard treatment. We sampled 26 patients who accepted to participate in the study. They were randomly assigned to one of the three arms of the study. Preliminary data suggest that actually the Action Observation Treatment has the power to boos rehabilitation when matched with a traditional treatment. Furthermore, the 3D video stimulation seems to have a higher impact on cognitive and physical variables, thus suggesting that the use of 3D stimulation may constitute a cognitive tool to be used in hospital settings, while 2D videos might be considered an at-home tool to be used autonomously to maintain and further boost outcomes.