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Retrograde amnesia is a severe memory loss dramatically affecting patient’s quality of life. Traumatic brain injuries, strokes, degenerative processes or metabolic disorders are the main causes. At present, rehabilitation tries to recover patients’ memory by means of neuro-cognitive exercises guided by a physiotherapist. Unfortunately, the adherence to these rehabilitation exercises drops when patients are discharged from hospital. Furthermore, conventional rehabilitation is usually performed using standard exercises, which are not customized to each patient. The reproducibility of real environments and situations is a crucial feature to guarantee the efficacy of neuro-rehabilitation and it is defined as ecological validity. Ecological validity is important for making the exercises useful to re-learn specific information and for performing daily activities with the lowest effort. Nowadays, the traditional rehabilitation for retrograde amnesia is based on a set of pictures shown to the patient to remember or learn familiar environments, such as his/her home. This approach is very limiting because the patient can see few points of view of the home without learning and memorizing how to move and get into a specific room. Therefore, the traditional approach has a low ecological validity. The advent of innovative technology, like 3D scanners and virtual reality, permit the design of innovative solutions that virtually replicate patient’s home. This research work presents a novel procedure to design serious games for neuro-cognitive rehabilitation for patient with retrograde amnesia. The proposed procedure exploits low-cost and free technologies; in particular, the Occipital Structure sensor has been chosen as 3D scanner to acquire the 3D indoor environments, which are used inside Unity to develop the game logic of the serious games. The HTC Vive Pro head mounted display has been used to interact with the serious games in an immersive way. The designed procedure makes available a set of Unity scripts to develop the serious game for new patients by changing only the 3D environment (i.e., patient’s house). The procedure has been tested by creating three different serious games and the total time to create them can be approximated to a working day. The obtained results have been shown to medical personnel who have evaluated the proposed approach with a high ecological validity and decided to plan future medical tests by involving patients.

In fashion industry, 2D and 3D CAD systems to design garments already exist; however, some tasks of the process are neglected. We refer to made-to-measure garments and focus the attention on the first step of garment design, i.e. acquisition of customer’s measurement. In this paper we present an application based on mixed reality, named Tailor LABoratory (TLAB), which permits to take measures for clothing design as traditionally done by the tailor. TLAB has been developed using open source libraries (e.g., VTK and Blender) and low cost devices, such as Microsoft Kinect v2 to scan the human body, Oculus Rift v2 to create the 3D virtual reality and Leap Motion device to track hands motion. In particular, a virtual tape measure is made available to take measures interacting with the human avatar. To replicate the customer’s posture with her/his digital model, Blender has been adopted. It permits to manage body animations and automatic association of an animation to the 3D human avatar. Finally, preli...

The paper explores the possibility of using low-cost motion capture technologies to automatically evaluate patient’s condition concerning his/her walking condition. Two different technologies, optical markerless and inertial, are used to track the gait to be adopted in a doctor’s office or at patient’s home. The data acquired are elaborated using commercial and in-house developed tools with the aim of creating, in a near future, a simple environment for medical staff and people non highly skilled in IC technology. The paper shows the feasibility of an automatic detection of a set of gait abnormalities affecting people having a lower limb prosthesis. This constitutes a robust support for orthopedic technicians work and foresees the use of such technology for larger surveys and early detection of gait deviations.

This paper proposes a design approach to support the designer during the environmentally sustainable redesign of any product that can be modeled in CAD environment. It is a systematic computer-aided design procedure based on the integration of (1) virtual prototyping tools (e.g., 3D CAD, FEA, structural optimization), (2) function modeling techniques, and (3) Life Cycle Assessment-LCA tools. The core of the approach is the configuration of structural optimization strategies specifically conceived to obtain lighter and more compact products, and therefore, more eco-sustainable. The objective of the proposed methodology is to support the designer in choosing the best triad shape-material-production in order to determine the minimum environmental impact and ensure the structural and functional requirements of the product. A case study is described to show the potential of the proposed methodology as well as a discussion of the results.

This paper introduces a virtual laboratory to design prosthetic socket, which integrates a 3D CAD module, named Socket Modelling Assistant (SMA), specifically developed to create the socket digital model, and a CAE system to analyze the stump-socket interaction. Software tool, named Virtual Socket Lab (VSL), is part of a knowledge-based framework to design lower limb prosthesis centered on digital models of the patient or of his/her anatomical districts. The focus of this paper is on the definition of an automatic simulation procedure to study the stump-socket interaction and validate socket design. We first introduce the new design framework and main features of VSL. Then, we present a state of art on FE models adopted for residual lower-limb and prosthetic socket during last two decades highlighting key issues. Finally, the identified procedure and the integration strategy within SMA are described as well as preliminary results of the experimentation.