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Background and case: The vast majority of Parkinson’s disease (PD) cases occur sporadically without any obvious etiological schema. That poses major hurdles to the discovery of effective preventative and treatment strategies. Here we are reporting the case of an 86-year-old Caucasian male, with a 21-year history of PD, who reports complete resolution of PD - related motor symptoms after treatment with antibiotics for suspected bacterial osteomyelitis.Results: After a right leg injury, the patient was prescribed a ten-day course of ciprofloxacin and a four-week course of dicloxacillin for suspected osteomyelitis. After completion of the antibiotics, the patient reported his pervasive motor symptoms as “completely resolved” which to this day have not returned.Conclusion: PD is a progressive, mostly idiopathic, neurodegenerative disorder with effective but limited treatment options and without compelling preventative strategies. Here we identify the first case indicating the resolution of PD-linked motor symptoms following an unrelated treatment course with antibiotics. This raises interesting questions about the use of antibiotics in PD and the potential of an etiological bacterial connection. The microbiome signature of PD is a current ‘hot topic’ of investigation and studies need to continue investigating bacteria as a possible causes of PD and antibiotics as effective treatment modalities.

We describe a bio-feedback system for rehabilitation based on an accelerometric sensor, a processing unit and an output unit. The sensory unit, which incorporates a cell with three uni-axial accelerometers and three rate gyroscopes, is mounted on the subject's back (L5 level) using a velcro belt and allows to evaluate the trunk accelerations in the anterior-posterior (AP) and medial-lateral (ML) directions. The processing unit is composed by a laptop with Arduino board, able to acquire in real time data coming from sensory unit through the data acquisition module of Max/MSP, and to produce an audio output. The output unit is a pair of headphones which produce a kind of sound whose activation level is proportional to the magnitude of patient's displacement. A set of experiments have been carried out in order to measure the performance of this system, and results show that it can significantly improve rehabilitation times.

This study is aimed at identifying the collateral circulation in case of femoral-aorta-iliac axis obstruction, with the purpose of a more correct therapeutic indication being either medical or surgical or physiotherapeutic or combined.

Modern active hand prostheses include myoelectric controlled electronics and actuators to restore the lost biomechanics functionalities. It is here investigated the feasibility of a wireless transcutaneous telemetry link based on the UHF Radiofrequency Identification aimed at collecting the electromyographic signal just at the level of the muscular tissues. The link should interconnect one or more implanted battery-less antennas with an external miniaturized and conformal reader's antenna integrated with the prosthetic socket. Numerical models and preliminary laboratory experimentations demonstrated the possibility to successfully establish an RFID data link with a multiplicity of implanted tags even by using a low-power (0.25 W) embedded reader with a displacement-tolerance among interrogating and sensor antennas of 1-2 cm.

The composition of UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) crew will sometimes define roles specific to tasks associated with the Ground Control Station (GCS). The sensor operator task is specific to both the type of platform and GCS they are operating, but in many instances the role of this operator is critical in determining mission success. In order to assess mission effectiveness we applied human performance measures that focussed on neurological brain imaging techniques and other physiological biomarkers in conjunction with behavioral data acquired from the sensor operator task. In the execution of the experiment, this included such tasks as route scanning, target detection and positive identification, and the tracking of identified targets. Within the scope of this paper, we reported the preliminary results for the route scanning task. Over the duration of three trials brain activity measures from the prefrontal cortex region were acquired via functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) in this research study. As the trials progressed, there was a significant difference between low and high performers on the route scanning task as determined by specific biomarkers, namely oxygenated haemoglobin. These findings support previous studies and indicates the benefits of applying neurophysiological measures in order to gain further objective insight into human cognitive performance. The use of fNIRS in this context is also discussed in terms of providing a key benefit in dynamically evaluating human performance in parallel with personalized training for UAV operators.