Positive Technology Journal

According to the recent “ISTAG SCENARIOS FOR AMBIENT INTELLIGENCE 2010” (European Commission, February 2001) the evolutionary technology scenarios in support of the Knowledge Society of the years 2000’s will be rooted into three dominant trends:

- Pervasive diffusion of intelligence in the space around us, through the development of network technologies towards the objective of the so-called “Ambient Intelligence” (AmI);
- Increasingly relevant role of mobility, through the develpoment of mobile communications, from the UMTS towards the so-called “Fourth Generation” (4G);
- Increase of reachness and completeness of communications, through the development of multimedia technologies, towards the “Immersive Virtual Telepresence” (TIV), including an increased attention to the aspects of human perception and of person-machine interaction.

The TIV perspective is reached through the complete development of multimedia technologies, generating far away the sense of presence through the integrated availability of sound, vision, smell, touch-and-feel (haptics) signals. Typically, the sense of presence is accomplished through multisensor stimuli by means of which actual reality is either hidden and substituted with a virtual reality, i.e. fully synthetic, or is virtualized, i.e. made virtual through audio and 3-D video analysis and modeling procedures.

The convergence of AmI, 4G and TIV technologies manifests itself as the next frontier of ICT. This convergence will determine the advent of ubiquitous 3-D telecommunications and the built-up of intelligent environments for health care in which complex multimedia contents integrate and enrich the real space. The most ambitious objective is to integrate the computer interfaces in the real environment (Mixed Reality) so that the user can take advantage of the clinical care in the most natural and intuitive way.

The Neurotiv Project aims at improving the know-how level, at generating new development and application opportunities, at organizing and finalizing multidisciplinary skills, and at developing system and component prototypes for the use of TIV technologies in a managed care system for neuropsychology and clinical psychology.

More in detail, the project aims at:

- proving the technical and clinical viability of integrating TIV systems in a managed care platform for neuro-psychology assessment and rehabilitation
- designing/tuning and developing managed care tools to be used in the prevention, planning provision and follow-up of the required treatment. The developed modules will be optimised to meet the demands of the emerging 2,5G/GPRS and 3G/UMTS wireless networks and terminals.
- Defining new treatment protocols for the use of the clinical tools in assessment, therapy and follow up.
- Verify the clinical economic/organizative efficacy of the managed care system by using controlled clinical trials.
- Disseminating the obtained results through scientific papers and conference presentations.

More to explore

The NEUROTIV project web site