Thesis Project Form

It is well known that sports have a positive impact on the quality of life of people with a spinal cord injury (SCI). Among the many sports adapted for people with this type of injury, archery is one of the most practiced. This sport is one of the first introduced in the medical treatment of people with SCI and has proved ideal for training the muscles of the arms, shoulders and trunk, i.e. the muscles groups above the level of injury usually treated and trained following a spinal cord injury. In this context, it is essential to carry out a careful monitoring of the performance for two main reasons: (1) to prevent injuries due to incorrect executions that could have negative effects on both the physical and mental health of the person; (2) to monitor the effect of sport practice as a rehabilitative tool.

The long-term goal is to define a protocol and a set of parameters to assess the muscle and kinematic strategies adopted during the execution of the archery gesture by both healthy and spinal cord injured individuals.
Specifically, we aim to:
Aim 1. investigate possible neuromuscular performance differences in healthy subjects when performing the archery gesture while sitting and standing;
Aim 2. characterize differences in movement strategies induced by different levels and types of SCI;
Aim 3. investigate possible alterations in movement performance, in both healthy and SCI individuals, when executing the archery gesture indoors and outdoors.

The student will learn:
- Use “markerless” motion capture techniques to collect kinematic data under different environment conditions (indoor, outdoor, etc..);
- Define, develop and test an experimental set up capable of combining different systems and techniques in order to collect synchronously kinematic and electromyographic data;
- Elaborate and analyze kinematic and electromyographic data;
- Correlate data in order to have a comprehensive understanding of the phenomenon.