BETTER-EEU project

Overview of the original BETTER project

Cerebral vascular accident (CVA, Stroke) is the third cause of death in Western society. About 4.7 million stroke survivors are alive today. Impaired walking ability contributes to post-stroke walking disability. Walking incorrectly creates a stigma and makes patients more susceptible to injury, affecting their quality of life. Currently, most promising interventions to restore walking function are based on robotic systems that intend to restore function by focusing on actions at periphery of the body (a BOTTOM-UP approach). It is not clear how effective these treatments are and a major problem is patient's non-compliance.

The principal goals of the BETTER project (FP7-ICT-2009-4, Contract no. 247935) are:

improving physical rehabilitation therapies of gait disorders in stroke patients based on BNCI assistive technologies (EEG, NIRS, EMG, IMU),
characterizing the user involvement,
providing guidelines for improving the ambulatory and non-ambulatory robotic gait trainers,
developing benchmarking and evaluation tools,
validating the concept of improving stroke rehabilitation with TOP-DOWN approach: the wearable exoskeletons and robotic gait trainers exert physical stimulation of lower limbs as a function of targeted neural activation patterns. This intervention is expected to result in reorganizations in the cortex. This TOP-DOWN therapeutic treatment encourages reorganisation of the affected brain structures to improve motor functions.

For more information about the BETTER project please visit the main BETTER homepage!

Overview of the BETTER-EEU extension

The BETTER–EEU project aims to extend the above BNCI system with the video-based system and advanced graphical feedback to the patient in order to:

quantify patient’s motivation and attention on visual feedback and patient's mental fatigue due to the visual stimuli during the rehabilitation,
develop advanced dynamically generated visual feedback driven by merged information from BNCI and video-based systems,
validate, technically and functionally, the proposed concept of online user compliance assessment.

The results of BETTER-EEU project are expected to contribute to the practical spread of BNCI-based technologies, both directly (in stroke rehabilitation) and indirectly by showing the way to a robust and cost-affordable assessment of user compliance and motivation.

Project details:

Proposal number: 287592
Proposal acronym: BETTER-EEU
Call: FP7-ICT-2011-7
Activity: ICT-7-11.3
Duration: 18 months
Start date: 1. 8. 2011
End date: 31. 1. 2013

Planned activities

The UM team is responsible for four workpackages (WP), three milestones and two final deliverables:

WP 1: Development of algorithms for video-based quantification of user’s attention to visual feedback
WP 2: Merging of video-based attention assessment with information stream from brain monitoring techniques
WP 3: Implementation/update of closed-loop visual feed system, capable of adapting to the dynamics of rehabilitation
WP 4: Integration of video-based attention assessment and closed-loop dynamic visual feedback with other components of BETTER non-ambulatory system and their functional evaluation

The University of Maribor (UM) team

Project partners

	Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas Madrid, Spain José L. Pons (Project Coordinator) Juan C. Moreno (Scientific Coordinator)
	Instituto de Biomecánica de Valencia Valencia, Spain
	Universitaetsmedizin Goettingen, Georg-August-Universitaet Goettingen Goettingen, Germany
	Graz University of Technology Graz, Austria
	Guger Technologies OEG Graz, Austria
	Fondazione Santa Lucia Rome, Italy
	Össur hf Reykjiavik, Iceland
	Eberhard-Karls-Universitat Tübingen, Germany
	Technaid S.L. Madrid, Spain