Research
Project
StimuLOOP is an interdisciplinary and technologically innovative project with the goal of developing new, groundbreaking treatment approaches for stroke and parkinson's disease.
Stroke and Parkinson’s disease (PD) are the most common neurological disease in the elderly population and account for substantial disability and health care costs. Disability is largely driven by mobility deficits caused by impaired gait. Effective treatments to improve gait requries personalisation, a concept we refer to as precision neurorehabilitation.
StimuLOOP explores fundamental new approaches to precision rehabilitation of gait in stroke and PD patients.
- Hyper-personalized feedback (HPF): For lower limb motor rehabilitation, we will employ real-time continuous feedback for movement aspects that are specific to each participant’s motor deficit. The provision of feedback will be adapted to the participant’s sensory profile. This results in a two-step personalization; in the first step, we will choose what movement aspect is therapeutically targeted, and in the second step, we will define how the feedback is presented to the participant.
- Targeted memory reactivation (TMR): We aim to reactivate rehabilitation-related memories through presentation of auditory stimuli during sleep with the goal of promoting motor memory consolidation (movement patterns that are learned during HPF) into stable motor commands.
Accordingly, we have designed several clinical studies that address these questions. Our study section provides information on these including detailed information.
Clinical Studies
We are conducting a set of clinical studies with the aim to improve gait for stroke and parkinson patients. This leads to new rehabilitation standards while trial participants benefit from the best therapy currently available. The safety of patients is always a primary concern in our clinical trials.
Facilities
Through our consortium we have access to a wide range of state-of the art facilities and cutting edge technology
CAREN
Our real-time gait lab – computer assisted rehabilitation environment CAREN at cereneo center for neurology and rehabilitation is our newest and core facility.
Caren, developed by Motek is among the world’s most advanced biomechanics laboratory. It is a versatile, multi-sensory system used for clinical analysis, rehabilitation, and the evaluation and training of human movement, balance and gait.
The CAREN combines a motion platform with six degrees of freedom, an instrumented force plate dual belt treadmill, motion capture, high speed video, D-Flow software, virtual reality (VR) and surround sound, and uses game elements and immersive interactions to engage the subject within a real time feedback loop.
Gait Lab
Our gait lab at cereneo center for neurology includes an Optical motion Capture System (Vicon Nexus); Split-belt treadmill with integrated force plates; Motion platform with 6D motion; EMG System (Cometa Wave Pico; 8ch, EMG & IMU options); and 3 high speed video cameras (Basler)
Gait Lab
Our gait lab at ETH Hönggerberg at the laboratory of movement mechanics focuses on the study of kinematics and kinetics in healthy, reconstructed and replaced joints. Our key technologies include videofluoroscopy and synchronous motion analysis by means of skin markers, force plates and electromyography.
RELab
Our Relab at ETH located at Balgrist Campus uses robotics, wearable sensor technologies and non-invasive neuroimaging to explore, assess and restore sensorimotor function in persons with neurological injury, with the goal of promoting indepence. We closely collaborate with neurorehabilitation clinics and clinical scientists to develop and clinically evaluate our technologies.
Sleep Lab
Our Sleep lab is located at the University Children’s Hospital Zurich. We specialize in neurodevelopmental disorders, learning and sleep regulation in health and disease.
In collaboration with Tosoo AG and the MHSL SleepLoop consortium, we investigate different forms of auditory stimulation during sleep in the home and the laboratory. A wearable device designed for this purpose records brain activity during sleep and administers auditory stimulations via headphones. These can be used to enhance (up-phase locked auditory stimulation) or decrease (down-phase locked auditory stimulation) synchronous neural activity in deep sleep, affecting memory and recovery. We combine this technique with behavioral assessments, high-density EEG recordings or neuroimaging methods to investigate the behavioral and neural effects of auditory stimulation during sleep.
https://www.neuroscience.uzh.ch/en/research/sleep_and_sleep_disorders.html
Publications
DK Ravi, CR Baumann, E Bernasconi, M Gwerder, N König Ignasiak, M Uhl, L Stieglitz, WR Taylor, NB Singh, Does Subthalamic Deep Brain Stimulation Impact Asymmetry and Dyscoordination of Gait in Parkinson’s Disease? Neurorehabilitation & Neural Repair, 35, 2021, https://doi.org/10.1177/15459683211041309.
DK Ravi, M Bartholet, A Skiadopoulos, JA Kent, J Wickstrom, WR Taylor, NB Singh, N Stergiou, Rhythmic auditory stimuli modulate movement recovery in response to perturbation during locomotion, Journal of Experimental Biology, 224, 2021, https://doi.org/10.1242/jeb.237073.
DK Ravi, M Gwerder, N König Ignasiak, CR Baumann, M Uhl, JH van Dieën, WR Taylor, NB Singh, Revealing the optimal thresholds for movement performance: a systematic review and meta-analysis to benchmark pathological walking behaviour, Neuroscience & Biobehavioural Reviews, 108, 2020, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2019.10.008.
N König Ignasiak, DK Ravi, S Orter, HS Hosseini Nasab, WR Taylor, NB Singh, Does variability of footfall kinematics correlate with dynamic stability of the center of mass during walking? PLoS ONE, 14(5), 2019, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0217460.
Alain Ryser, Laura Manduchi, Fabian Laumer, Holger Michel, Sven Wellmann, Julia E. Vogt, Interpretable Anomaly Detection in Echocardiograms with Dynamic Variational Trajectory Models, 2022, https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.15316
Thomas M. Sutter, Laura Manduchi, Alain Ryser, Julia E. Vogt, Learning Selection Bias and Group Importance: Differentiable Reparameterization for the Hypergeometric Distribution, 2022, https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.01629
Latency-Aware Industrial Fog Application Orchestration with Kubernetes, IEEE, 2020, https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9144934
Herrmann, L., Kasties, V., et al., Nx4 attenuated stress‐induced activity of the anterior cingulate cortex—A post‐hoc analysis of a randomized placebo‐controlled crossover trial, 2022, Human Psychopharmacology: Clinical and Experimental, e2837, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35213077/
Kasties, V., Karnath, H.O., Sperber, C. (2021). Strategies for feature extraction from structural brain imaging in lesion-deficit modelling. Human Brain Mapping, 42.16 (2021): 5409-5422., https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8519857/https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8519857/
Herrmann, L., Vicheva, P., Kasties, et al. (2020). fMRI revealed reduced amygdala activation after Nx4 in mildly to moderately stressed healthy volunteers in a randomized, placebo-controlled, cross-over trial. Scientific reports, 10(1), 1-14., https://europepmc.org/article/med/32123197