Background and Objectives: Meditation and mindfulness, rooted in ancient traditions, enhance mental well-being by cultivating awareness and emotional control. It has been shown to induce neuroplasticity, increase cortical thickness, reduce amygdala reactivity, and improve brain connectivity and neurotransmitter levels, leading to improved emotional regulation, cognitive function, and stress resilience. This systematic review will synthesize research on neurobiological changes associated with mindfulness and meditation practices. Materials and Methods: Studies were identified from an online search of PubMed, Web of Science, Cochrane Library, and Embase databases without any search time range. This review has been registered on Open OSF (n) GV2JY. Results: Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) enhances brain regions related to emotional processing and sensory perception, improves psychological outcomes like anxiety and depression, and exhibits unique mechanisms of pain reduction compared to placebo. Conclusions: This review highlights that mindfulness, particularly through MBSR, improves emotional regulation and brain structure, reduces anxiety, and enhances stress resilience. Future research should focus on diverse populations and naturalistic settings to better understand and optimize these benefits.

Background: Assessing fall risk, especially in individuals with neurological disorders, is essential to prevent hospitalization, hypomobility, and reduced functional independence. Wearable sensors are increasingly used in neurorehabilitation, as they enable unsupervised fall risk assessment by providing continuous monitoring during daily functional tasks, thereby offering a reflection of the individual’s real-world fall risk. Objective: We systematically reviewed the literature on reliable biomechanical gait parameters detected with wearable sensors to assess fall risk in neurological disorders, focusing on patients with Parkinson disease, multiple sclerosis, stroke, or Alzheimer disease. In addition, we examined the latest advancements in wearable sensor technology, including best practices for device placement as well as data processing and analysis. Methods: We conducted a comprehensive systematic search for relevant peer-reviewed articles published up to April 18, 2025, using PubMed, Web of Science, Embase, and IEEE Xplore, which are the most used databases in the fields of health and bioengineering. Results: The 19 included studies involved 2630 patients with neurological disorders, including 226 (8.59%) with multiple sclerosis (n=7, 37% studies), 2305 (87.64%) with Parkinson disease (n=8, 53% studies), 51 (1.94%) with stroke (n=3, 16% studies), and 48 (1.83%) with Alzheimer disease or cognitive impairment (n=1, 5% study). Conclusions: This review highlights the role of wearable technologies in assessing fall risk in patients with neurological disorders. Although the included studies showed variation in methods and a focus on technology over clinical context, the lack of standardization reflects ongoing advancements, which may be seen as a strength. Trial Registration: PROSPERO CRD42023463944; https://www.crd.york.ac.uk/PROSPERO/view/CRD42023463944

According to the modular hypothesis for the control of movement, muscles are recruited in synergies, which capture muscle coordination in space, time, or both. In the last two decades, muscle synergy analysis has become a well-established framework in the motor control field and for the characterization of motor impairments in neurological patients. Altered modular control during a locomotion task has been often proposed as a potential quantitative metric for characterizing pathological conditions. Therefore, the purpose of this systematic review is to analyze the recent literature that used a muscle synergy analysis of neurological patients’ locomotion as an indicator of motor rehabilitation therapy effectiveness, encompassing the key methodological elements to date. Searches for the relevant literature were made in Web of Science, PubMed, and Scopus. Most of the 15 full-text articles which were retrieved and included in this review identified an effect of the rehabilitation intervention on muscle synergies. However, the used experimental and methodological approaches varied across studies. Despite the scarcity of studies that investigated the effect of rehabilitation on muscle synergies, this review supports the utility of muscle synergies as a marker of the effectiveness of rehabilitative therapy and highlights the challenges and open issues that future works need to address to introduce the muscle synergies in the clinical practice and decisional process.

Objective. Muscle activation patterns in the muscle-to-force null space, i.e. patterns that do not generate task-relevant forces, may provide an opportunity for motor augmentation by allowing to control additional end-effectors simultaneously to natural limbs. Here we tested the feasibility of muscular null space control for augmentation by assessing simultaneous control of natural and extra degrees of freedom. Approach. We instructed eight participants to control translation and rotation of a virtual 3D end-effector by simultaneous generation of isometric force at the hand and null space activity extracted in real-time from the electromyographic signals recorded from 15 shoulder and arm muscles. First, we identified the null space components that each participant could control more naturally by voluntary co-contraction. Then, participants performed several blocks of a reaching and holding task. They displaced an ellipsoidal cursor to reach one of nine targets by generating force, and simultaneously rotated the cursor to match the target orientation by activating null space components. We developed an information-theoretic metric, an index of difficulty defined as the sum of a spatial and a temporal term, to assess individual null space control ability for both reaching and holding. Main results. On average, participants could reach the targets in most trials already in the first block (72%) and they improved with practice (maximum 93%) but holding performance remained lower (maximum 43%). As there was a high inter-individual variability in performance, we performed a simulation with different spatial and temporal task conditions to estimate those for which each individual participants would have performed best. Significance. Muscular null space control is feasible and may be used to control additional virtual or robotics end-effectors. However, decoding of motor commands must be optimized according to individual null space control ability.

Introduction: Ataxia is a neurological symptom that causes decreased balance, loss of coordination, and gait alterations. Innovative rehabilitation devices like virtual reality (VR) systems can provide task-oriented, repetitive and intensive training with multisensorial feedback, thus promoting neuroplastic processes. Among these VR technologies, the Computer Assisted Rehabilitation ENvironment (CAREN) associates a split belt treadmill on a 6-degrees of freedom platform with a 180° VR screen and a Vicon motion capture system to monitor patients’ movements during training sessions.Methods: Eight patients affected by cerebellar ataxia were enrolled and received 20 sessions of CAREN training in addition to standard rehabilitation treatment. Each patient was evaluated at the beginning and at the end of the study with 3D gait analysis and clinical scales to assess balance, gait function and risk of falls.Results: We found improvements in kinematic, kinetic, and electromyographic parameters (as per pre-post- CAREN training), as well as in clinical outcomes, such as balance and risk of falls in ataxic patients. In addition, we found that trunk rotation improved, after CAREN intervention, approximating to the normative values.Discussion: Our results suggested that CAREN might be useful to improve specific biomechanical parameters of gait in ataxic patients.

In recent years, there has been a notable increase in the clinical adoption of instrumental upper limb kinematic assessment. This trend aligns with the rising prevalence of cerebrovascular impairments, one of the most prevalent neurological disorders. Indeed, there is a growing need for more objective outcomes to facilitate tailored rehabilitation interventions following stroke. Emerging technologies, like head-mounted virtual reality (HMD-VR) platforms, have responded to this demand by integrating diverse tracking methodologies. Specifically, HMD-VR technology enables the comprehensive tracking of body posture, encompassing hand position and gesture, facilitated either through specific tracker placements or via integrated cameras coupled with sophisticated computer graphics algorithms embedded within the helmet. This review aims to present the state-of-the-art applications of HMD-VR platforms for kinematic analysis of the upper limb in post-stroke patients, comparing them with conventional tracking systems. Additionally, we address the potential benefits and challenges associated with these platforms. These systems might represent a promising avenue for safe, cost-effective, and portable objective motor assessment within the field of neurorehabilitation, although other systems, including robots, should be taken into consideration.