Designing interactive sound for motor rehabilitation tasks

Technology-assisted motor rehabilitation is today one of the most potentially interesting application areas for research in SID. The strong social implications, the novelty of such a rapidly advancing field, as well as its inherently interdisciplinary nature (contents combine topics in robotics, virtual reality, and haptics as well as neuroscience and rehabilitation) are some of the aspects that consolidate its challenging and captivating character. Such prospects justify the considerable amount of attention it has received in the last decade from researchers in the fields of both medicine and engineering, the purpose of their joint effort being the development of innovative methods to treat motor disabilities occurring as a consequence of several possible traumatic (physical or neurological) injuries. The final goal of the designed rehabilitation process is to facilitate reintegration of patients into social and domestic life by helping them regain the ability to autonomously perform activities of daily living (ADLs, e.g., eating or walking). However, such activities embody complex motor tasks for which current rehabilitation systems lack the sophistication needed in order to assist patients during their performance. Much work is needed to address challenges related to hardware, software, control system design, as well as effective approaches for delivering treatment [ 13 ]. In particular, although it is understood that multimodal feedback can be used to improve the performance in complex motor tasks [ 9 ], a thorough analysis of the literature in this field shows that the potential of auditory feedback is largely underestimated.