Project description
Detecting awareness of patients suffering disorders of consciousness
Patients with a disorder of consciousness (DOC), which broadly includes the syndromes of coma, vegetative state and minimally conscious state, cannot communicate even though they may be aware of themselves and/or their environment. There is also evidence that DOC patients show signs of reacting on electroencephalography (EEG), which records the electrical activity in the brain and can produce multimodal feedback in real-time. The EU-funded DOC-Stim project will create a new system that will be used to collect brain data from DOC patients. It will analyse the data to develop new knowledge that doctors can use. The project will advance technologies to restore movement for DOC patients.
Objective
Persons with a disorder of consciousness (DOC) have little or no ability to interact with people and devices. They are unable to control voluntary movement, and hence they cannot speak, blink, use devices for communication, or otherwise convey their needs and desires. Recent work from our group and others has shown that new methods and devices based on real-time EEG can help re-assess DOC patients’ cognitive functions and provide basic communication for them. Other work found that new tools to noninvasively monitor and stimulate brain activity could substantially improve recovery of persons with stroke or other disabilities. EEG data can detect each patient’s motor imagery and thereby influence multimodal feedback in real-time. This feedback may include VR avatars, functional electrical stimulation, and potentially even magnetic or electrical stimulation of motor areas of the cortex. This promising new research direction requires extensive collaboration across disciplines and sectors, and experienced researchers (ERs) with relevant experience. We will capitalize on our progress in both communicating with DOC patients and our new system for rehabilitation to get the project started quickly. The project will explore to create a new system that will be used to collect data with DOC patients. We will analyze the resulting data to develop new knowledge and contribute to improved tools that therapists and physicians can use. DOC-Stim includes extensive dissemination and communication activities to convey our project results to numerous audiences. The varied training activities will supplement the ER’s training-by-research to help prepare him for a high-impact career working across industrial, academic, and medical sectors. DOC-Stim will help position the ER for a leadership position in a rapidly growing new field while fostering technologies that could help restore movement for people who currently have little hope.
Fields of science
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
MSCA-IF - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowships (IF)Coordinator
08038 BARCELONA
Spain
The organization defined itself as SME (small and medium-sized enterprise) at the time the Grant Agreement was signed.