Objective: We aimed to setup a novel Mobile Brain / Body Imaging (MoBI) system and to perform a feasibility study for the future investigations of cortical, muscular and cortico-muscular alterations in early Parkinson disease (PD) subjects in an embedded cognitive environment.

Background: The simultaneous performance of cognitive and motor tasks can increase the differences in motor performance between healthy individuals and PD patients. The MoBI approach allows to simultaneously study different aspects of brain neurophysiological activity during different tasks, together with movement assessment. The Twin Brain project was funded by the EU Horizon2020 program (Grant agreement ID: 952401) and represents the collaboration between Slovenia, Germany, Switzerland and Italy to further develop the MoBI approach by including also hd-EMG activity measure, and to apply it in people with early PD.

Method: The MoBI approach includes the integration of different systems to evaluate human brain activity (hd-EEG), movement characteristics (full body motion sensors), and to propose a corticomuscular connectivity, also neuromuscular activation was included by high-density EMG. This novel MoBI setup was then applied to people with a diagnosis of PD in the early stage (age: 50-75 y, <5 y from the diagnosis, H&R = 1 or 2) to assess the integrated corticomuscolar responses during different postural and walking tasks, including dual motor-cognitive tasks, and to compare it with a group of healthy matched-controls.

Results: The integrated system and the experimental setup were successfully tested in the 15 early PD subjects. The synchronization of EEG, EMG and motion signals was found  to provide tracings acquired during movement suitable for future analyses allowing the extraction of the different physiological parameters in an embedded cognitive environment. In addition, the feasibility study showed that all the patents well accepted the application of the different MoBi devices and were able to correctly perform the required cognitive-motor tasks.

Conclusion: In this feasibility study the integrated MoBI solution was successfully tested in early PD patients. This approach will allow future investigations to evaluate corticomuscular alterations in this clinical population in order to support the development of novel rehabilitation strategies.

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MDS Abstracts - https://www.mdsabstracts.org/abstract/mobile-brain-body-imaging-in-early-parkinsons-disease-the-twin-brain-project/