This study present an intervention combining an electroencephalography-based brain computer interface with a hybrid robotic system for the modulation of the cortical excitability (plasticity). Plasticity is intended to be elicited through the association of the voluntary motor-related cortical processes with the hybrid assistance during the execution of reaching movement. The cortical excitability was assessed before and after the intervention measuring the peak-to-peak amplitude of the Motor Evoked Potentials (MEPs) induced through transcranial magnetic stimulation pulses. Five healthy subjects participated in the experiments. Results showed an overall and distributed increase in the cortical excitability as a result of the proposed intervention.

Every year, stroke significantly affects thousands of individuals who require rehabilitation to regain lost movements and return to a normal life. Exoskeletons are becoming a very powerful tool to help therapists in this rehabilitation process. This work presents a robotic exoskeleton designed to assist overground gait training for stroke survivors with deficits in gait coordination despite conventional rehabilitation. The device is a bilateral exoskeleton with six degrees of freedom and is designed to implement two control strategies. An adaptive trajectory control has been developed to guide the patient's limb within a desired path, allowing a deviation based on torque of interaction between the user and the exoskeleton. An admittance control strategy allows the robotic platform to capture the user's movements during assistive training and to replicate it during active training. Experimental results show that the exoskeleton can adapt a pre-recorded gait pattern for the gait pattern of a specific user. Future investigations will evaluate the device in the rehabilitation of patients who have suffered from stroke and make a comparative analysis of the effectiveness of different robotic therapies.

Environmental monitoring is one of the most classic applications of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN). Itaipu hydroelectric dam creates a unique scenario for the develop ment of this type of WSN with more than 200 square kilometers of natural forests. In this context, FLORA project is aimed at developing a habitat monitoring WSN to be deployed in the Zoo of Itaipu and in the Tati Yupi Biological Refuge. The de ployment includes more that 50 nodes. The paper describes the two scenarios of this ambitious and challenging application and presents the routing and topology control protocol developed in the framework of FLORA. The protocol was designed to fulfil the requirements of the application, extend the lifetime of the network, and to adapt to continuous nodes deployment and potential failures. It is based in several protocols already reported in the literature. The novel proposal is a reliable and lightweight routing protocol for wireless sensor network based on vector distance, collection tree, and energy aware distance vector protocols. The main idea is that each node of the network finds the shortest path to the sink with the best link quality, in order to guarantee the delivery of data to the sink despite the dynamic and lossy nature of wireless transmissions. The functionality of this novel protocol is presented as well as the results based on a TinyOS implementation and traditional WSN nodes (motes) including a CC2420 radio.

Biomechanical loading, in particular, viscous loading of the upper limb has been proposed in the literature as a means for suppressing pathologic tremor. It is expected that an improvement on manipulative function can be obtained by reducing the tremorous motion associated to some neurological disorders. This article presents two non-grounded control strategies to suppress tremor by means of a orthotic (wearable) exoskeleton. These two strategies are based on biomechanical loading and notch filtering of tremor via internal forces. Both controls strategies are evaluated and validated on the robotic exoskeleton called WOTAS (wearable orthosis for tremor assessment and suppression). At the end, results obtained in the pre-clinical trials and conclusions of this study are presented

Exoskeletal devices can provide assistance and supplement to the biological musculoskeletal members. We present a wearable robotic exoskeleton conceived as an improved lower leg orthosis for compensation of human knee and ankle joints disorders provoked by muscle weaknesses during walking, introducing novel biomechanical and user acceptance aspects and daily performance monitoring functionalities.