Rich Feedback Research Articles

Transformer-based partner dance motion generation

With the rapid development of information technology, particularly the recent breakthroughs in the field of artificial intelligence, the field of dance education has experienced an unprecedented transformation. Today, an increasing number of dance enthusiasts can experience an efficient and personalized immersive dance learning process via advanced artificial intelligence applications. Compared with the individual practice of solo dance, the learning process of partner dancing is more complex. Partner dancing requires not only a coordinated dance partner but also the abilities of both individuals to accurately follow each other's movements in real time as well as adjust and present the correct dance postures. In this study, we developed an innovative real-time virtual reality dance training framework tailored for interactive entertainment and teaching. Our framework used an enhanced transformer model that could generate partner movement sequences based on user movements. Furthermore, we established a somatosensory virtual reality interaction environment by integrating somatosensory devices to capture user movements in real time. These movement sequences were then fed into a network to produce partner movement sequences by generating virtual characters and creating an interactive dance learning system that can offer real-time feedback from a virtual partner. Our experiments validated the robustness and effectiveness of the proposed sequence generation model. In addition, we incorporated Laban movement analysis to explore the semantic representations of partner dances and devised a comprehensive set of evaluation indicators to assess the quality of the generated partner dance movements. The rigorous testing of each component and actual user testing demonstrated the effectiveness of the system. The system offered users rich interactive feedback and a scientifically grounded approach for learning to dance with a partner. Therefore, this study offers significant prospects for both intelligent dance teaching and human-computer interaction in virtual reality among other applications.

Large-Scale Assessments for Learning: A Human-Centred AI Approach to Contextualizing Test Performance

Large-scale assessments play a key role in education: educators and stakeholders need to know what students know and can do, so that they can be prepared for education policies and interventions in teaching and learning. However, a score from the assessment may not be enough—educators need to know why students got low scores, how students engaged with the tasks and the assessment, and how students with different levels of skills worked through the assessment. Process data, combined with response data, reflect students’ test-taking processes and can provide educators such rich information, but manually labelling the complex data is hard to scale for large-scale assessments. From scratch, we leveraged machine learning techniques (including supervised, unsupervised, and active learning) and experimented with a general human-centred AI approach to help subject matter experts efficiently and effectively make sense of big data (including students’ interaction sequences with the digital assessment platform, such as response, timing, and tool use sequences) to provide process profiles, that is, a holistic view of students’ entire test-taking processes on the assessment, so that performance can be viewed in context. Process profiles may help identify different sources for low performance and help generate rich feedback to educators and policy makers. The released National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) Grade 8 mathematics data were used to illustrate our proposed approach.

Does Multi-Actuator Vibrotactile Feedback Within Tangible Objects Enrich VR Manipulation?

Rich, informative and realistic haptic feedback is key to enhancing Virtual Reality (VR) manipulation. Tangible objects provide convincing grasping and manipulation interactions with haptic feedback of e.g., shape, mass and texture properties. But these properties are static, and cannot respond to interactions in the virtual environment. On the other hand, vibrotactile feedback provides the opportunity for delivering dynamic cues rendering many different contact properties, such as impacts, object vibrations or textures. Handheld objects or controllers in VR are usually restricted to vibrating in a monolithic fashion. In this article, we investigate how spatialiazing vibrotactile cues within handheld tangibles could enable a wider range of sensations and interactions. We conduct a set of perception studies, investigating the extent to which spatialization of vibrotactile feedback within tangible objects is possible as well as the benefits of proposed rendering schemes leveraging multiple actuators in VR. Results show that vibrotactile cues from localized actuators can be discriminated and are beneficial for certain rendering schemes.

Evolution and Future of Serious Game Technology for Older Adults

Serious games play a key role in the medical field, particularly in enhancing cognitive abilities in the elderly. However, the sensory organs of the elderly decline over time, and the intervention effect of traditional serious games for older adults.. The objective of this study is to identify the evolution and current problems of serious game technology for the elderly by using bibliometric analysis. We selected 319 relevant documents from 2013 to 2024 from the Web of Science (WOS) database. This study uses Publish or Perish (Windows GUl Edition) and VOSviewer(1.6.20) for performance analysis and scientific charting. We deeply analyze the early trends, emerging technologies, and publication trends, including citations and journals, subject areas, and regional and institutional. Here, we identified serious games for older adults rely heavily on visual presentation, often utilizing screens for screening, rehabilitation, and therapeutic interventions. This may cause further visual impairment in older adults who are experiencing visual decline. In addition, we proposed the combination of rich tactile feedback and external devices as one of the effective solutions to the current problems for future research.

Show-and-Tell: An Interface for Delivering Rich Feedback upon Creative Media Artefacts

In this paper, we explore an approach to feedback which could allow those learning creative digital media practices in remote and asynchronous environments to receive rich, multi-modal, and interactive feedback upon their creative artefacts. We propose the show-and-tell feedback interface which couples graphical user interface changes (the show) to a text-based explanations (the tell). We describe the rationale behind the design and offer a tentative set of design criteria. We report the implementation and deployment into a real-world educational setting using a prototype interface developed to allow either traditional text-only feedback or our proposed show-and tell feedback across four sessions. The prototype was used to provide formative feedback upon music students’ coursework resulting in a total of 103 pieces of feedback. Thematic analysis was used to analyse the data obtained through interviews and focus groups with both educators and students (i.e., feedback givers and receivers). Recipients considered show-and-tell feedback to possess greater clarity and detail in comparison with the single modality text-only feedback they are used to receiving. We also report interesting emergent issues around control and artistic vision, and we discuss how these issues could be mitigated in future iterations of the interface.

Making assessment a team sport: a qualitative study of facilitated group feedback in internal medicine residency.

Competency-based medical education relies on feedback from workplace-based assessment (WBA) to direct learning. Unfortunately, WBAs often lack rich narrative feedback and show bias towards Medical Expert aspects of care. Building on research examining interactive assessment approaches, the Queen's University Internal Medicine residency program introduced a facilitated, team-based assessment initiative ("Feedback Fridays") in July 2017, aimed at improving holistic assessment of resident performance on the inpatient medicine teaching units. In this study, we aim to explore how Feedback Fridays contributed to formative assessment of Internal Medicine residents within our current model of competency-based training. A total of 53 residents participated in facilitated, biweekly group assessment sessions during the 2017 and 2018 academic year. Each session was a 30-minute facilitated assessment discussion done with one inpatient team, which included medical students, residents, and their supervising attending. Feedback from the discussion was collected, summarized, and documented in narrative form in electronic WBA forms by the program's assessment officer for the residents. For research purposes, verbatim transcripts of feedback sessions were analyzed thematically. The researchers identified four major themes for feedback: communication, intra- and inter-personal awareness, leadership and teamwork, and learning opportunities. Although feedback related to a broad range of activities, it showed strong emphasis on competencies within the intrinsic CanMEDS roles. Additionally, a clear formative focus in the feedback was another important finding. The introduction of facilitated team-based assessment in the Queen's Internal Medicine program filled an important gap in WBA by providing learners with detailed feedback across all CanMEDS roles and by providing constructive recommendations for identified areas for improvement.

Outcomes-Based Teaching and Learning Assessment Instrument for Teachers in Higher Education

Outcomes-based teaching and learning (OBTL) has emerged as one of the useful pedagogical approaches and is widely adopted in countries such as Hong Kong and the Philippines. However, it has been observed that many classroom teachers struggle in faithfully implementing it because of the lack of a tool that would provide rich feedback regarding its implementation. Hence, the current study sought to develop and validate an instrument that will assess in-service teachers’ implementation of OBTL in the classroom. This paper describes the assessment instrument development process and results from 903 university students. Results provided strong empirical support for the six OBTL domains (i.e., learning process, instructional strategies, assessment, learning environment, classroom management, and teacher qualities). The items indicated in the assessment instrument were grounded in previous literature about OBTL, with each domain strongly correlating with each other. Implications for classroom practise and future studies are discussed.

Brain-machine interface learning is facilitated by specific patterning of distributed cortical feedback.

Neuroprosthetics offer great hope for motor-impaired patients. One obstacle is that fine motor control requires near-instantaneous, rich somatosensory feedback. Such distributed feedback may be recreated in a brain-machine interface using distributed artificial stimulation across the cortical surface. Here, we hypothesized that neuronal stimulation must be contiguous in its spatiotemporal dynamics to be efficiently integrated by sensorimotor circuits. Using a closed-loop brain-machine interface, we trained head-fixed mice to control a virtual cursor by modulating the activity of motor cortex neurons. We provided artificial feedback in real time with distributed optogenetic stimulation patterns in the primary somatosensory cortex. Mice developed a specific motor strategy and succeeded to learn the task only when the optogenetic feedback pattern was spatially and temporally contiguous while it moved across the topography of the somatosensory cortex. These results reveal spatiotemporal properties of the sensorimotor cortical integration that set constraints on the design of neuroprosthetics.

Axonal mapping of the motor cranial nerves.

Basic behaviors, such as swallowing, speech, and emotional expressions are the result of a highly coordinated interplay between multiple muscles of the head. Control mechanisms of such highly tuned movements remain poorly understood. Here, we investigated the neural components responsible for motor control of the facial, masticatory, and tongue muscles in humans using specific molecular markers (ChAT, MBP, NF, TH). Our findings showed that a higher number of motor axonal population is responsible for facial expressions and tongue movements, compared to muscles in the upper extremity. Sensory axons appear to be responsible for neural feedback from cutaneous mechanoreceptors to control the movement of facial muscles and the tongue. The newly discovered sympathetic axonal population in the facial nerve is hypothesized to be responsible for involuntary control of the muscle tone. These findings shed light on the pivotal role of high efferent input and rich somatosensory feedback in neuromuscular control of finely adjusted cranial systems.

Artificial Leaky Integrate-and-Fire Sensory Neuron for In-Sensor Computing Neuromorphic Perception at the Edge.

Neuromorphic perception and computing show great promise in terms of energy efficiency and data bandwidth compared to von Neumann's computing architecture. In-sensor computing allows perception information processing at the edge, which is highly dependent on the functional fusion of receptors and neurons. Here, a leaky integrate-and-fire (LIF) artificial spiking sensory neuron (ASSN) based on a NbOx memristor and an a-IGZO thin-film transistor (TFT) is successfully developed. The ASSN is fabricated mainly through simple sputter deposition processes, showing the prospect of high process compatibility and potential for integration fabrication. The device shows excellent spike encoding ability to deliver the neuromorphic information through spike rate and time-to-first spike. Moreover, in the ASSN, the a-IGZO TFT not only provides the fundamental spike signal computing function of the artificial neuron but also has NO2 gas and ultraviolet (UV) light dual sensitivity to introduce the neuromorphic perception capability. As a result, the ASSN successfully exhibits an inhibitory property under NO2 stimulation while exhibiting an excitatory state under UV light stimulation. Futhermore, self-adaption and lateral regulation circuits between different ASSNs are proposed at the edge in mimicking biological neurons' rich interconnection and feedback mechanisms. The ASSNs successfully achieve self-regulation after a huge response during a burst stimulus. In addition, the neuron transmits a more obvious output when the target-sensitive events occur through the edge internal regulation. The self-adaption and lateral regulation demonstrated in ASSN move an important step forward to in-sensor computing, which provides the potential for a multiscene perception in complex environments.

Stereoptic serious games as a visual rehabilitation tool for individuals with a residual amblyopia (AMBER trial): a protocol for a crossover randomized controlled trial

BackgroundAmblyopia is the most common developmental vision disorder in children. The initial treatment consists of refractive correction. When insufficient, occlusion therapy may further improve visual acuity. However, the challenges and compliance issues associated with occlusion therapy may result in treatment failure and residual amblyopia. Virtual reality (VR) games developed to improve visual function have shown positive preliminary results. The aim of this study is to determine the efficacy of these games to improve vision, attention, and motor skills in patients with residual amblyopia and identify brain-related changes. We hypothesize that a VR-based training with the suggested ingredients (3D cues and rich feedback), combined with increasing the difficulty level and the use of various games in a home-based environment is crucial for treatment efficacy of vision recovery, and may be particularly effective in children.MethodsThe AMBER study is a randomized, cross-over, controlled trial designed to assess the effect of binocular stimulation (VR-based stereoptic serious games) in individuals with residual amblyopia (n = 30, 6–35 years of age), compared to refractive correction on vision, selective attention and motor control skills. Additionally, they will be compared to a control group of age-matched healthy individuals (n = 30) to account for the unique benefit of VR-based serious games. All participants will play serious games 30 min per day, 5 days per week, for 8 weeks. The games are delivered with the Vivid Vision Home software. The amblyopic cohort will receive both treatments in a randomized order according to the type of amblyopia, while the control group will only receive the VR-based stereoscopic serious games. The primary outcome is visual acuity in the amblyopic eye. Secondary outcomes include stereoacuity, functional vision, cortical visual responses, selective attention, and motor control. The outcomes will be measured before and after each treatment with 8-week follow-up.DiscussionThe VR-based games used in this study have been conceived to deliver binocular visual stimulation tailored to the individual visual needs of the patient, which will potentially result in improved basic and functional vision skills as well as visual attention and motor control skills.Trial registrationThis protocol is registered on ClinicalTrials.gov (identifier: NCT05114252) and in the Swiss National Clinical Trials Portal (identifier: SNCTP000005024).

Learning Designers as Expert Evaluators of Usability: Understanding Their Potential Contribution to Improving the Universality of Interface Design for Health Resources.

User-based evaluation by end users is an essential step in designing useful interfaces. Inspection methods can offer an alternate approach when end-user recruitment is problematic. A Learning Designers' usability scholarship could offer usability evaluation expertise adjunct to multidisciplinary teams in academic settings. The feasibility of Learning Designers as 'expert evaluators' is assessed within this study. Two groups, healthcare professionals and Learning Designers, applied a hybrid evaluation method to generate usability feedback from a palliative care toolkit prototype. Expert data were compared to end-user errors detected from usability testing. Interface errors were categorised, meta-aggregated and severity calculated. The analysis found that reviewers detected N = 333 errors, with N = 167 uniquely occurring within the interface. Learning Designers identified errors at greater frequencies (60.66% total interface errors, mean (M) = 28.86 per expert) than other evaluator groups (healthcare professionals 23.12%, M = 19.25 and end users 16.22%, M = 9.0). Patterns in severity and error types were also observed between reviewer groups. The findings suggest that Learning Designers are skilled in detecting interface errors, which benefits developers assessing usability when access to end users is limited. Whilst not offering rich narrative feedback generated by user-based evaluations, Learning Designers complement healthcare professionals' content-specific knowledge as a 'composite expert reviewer' with the ability to generate meaningful feedback to shape digital health interfaces.

Robot-Assisted Immersive Kinematic Experience Transfer for Welding Training

Human motor skills are critical for executing a variety range of tasks in construction. Traditional hands-on training is resource and labor intensive, whereas virtual training, such as video demonstrations, cannot provide trainees with egocentric kinesthetic or proprioceptive experience such as muscular engagement. It is important to develop remote training methods that can provide rich sensory feedback and leverage the trainee’s proprioception. This paper proposes a novel remote motor skill training system that can transfer experts’ kinematic and kinesthetic experience, including both positional and force experience, to novice trainees by using virtual reality (VR) and a robot arm without the physical presence of the experts. The system uses VR to simulate virtual operation scenarios and interactions to provide an immersive operation experience. The robotic system records experts’ kinematic and kinesthetic patterns and trains novices with perceptual learning. The system design was demonstrated with a welding training task. A welding simulator was built with a Unity engine and a seven-degrees-of-freedom robot arm, which provided high-fidelity welding experience and could actively guide welding trainees. It was found that the welding simulator was resilient to external disturbance and provided accurate feedback and guidance. The proposed system contributes to the design of a more embodied remote motor skill training method.

Designing pedagogical change: Fostering creativity in communication design education by removing grades

This article examines the deliberations and actions of a group of communication design educators in replacing discretionary grading in eight core units of a design course with a combination of pass/fail grading, rich formative feedback and a reinvigorated studio environment. The changes sought to better focus students on their creative process and improve their awareness of their acquisition of attributes, skills and knowledge along the path to becoming work-ready graduates. The traditional studio model of graphic design education approaches student learning through immersion in practice, imagining novice designers absorbing abilities and dispositions through experimentation and proximity to discipline experts and peers. If this model ever truly operated in Australia’s design schools, it has been eviscerated by the massification, marketization and rationalization of tertiary education since the early 1990s. Australian design education now operates with significantly reduced contact hours, tightly scheduled classes and standardized administrative, classroom and assessment practices that do not effectively model professional practice and limit students’ development of creative confidence. Another barrier to fostering students’ design acumen is their frequent fixation on grades as markers of success. We looked to removing grades to revitalize students’ flagging creative ambitions within the constraints of a tertiary education system we could not change. In stressing that a move to pass/fail grading is not an action to be taken lightly, we discuss our research into its advantages and disadvantages, the integral reconceptualization of learning and teaching approaches required to make the change and the challenges in implementation. This included understanding how students and staff interacted in the studio, their emotional and philosophical attachment to graded assessment, the effort required to communicate the changes to staff and students and developing resources to combat the fragmentation of the educational experience, which risks stripping change of its meaning and purpose.

Fully 3D‐Printed, Stretchable, and Conformable Haptic Interfaces

AbstractIntegrating rich cutaneous haptic feedback enhances realism and user immersion in virtual and augmented reality settings. One major challenge is providing accurately localized cutaneous stimuli on fingertips without interfering with the user's dexterity. This sub 200 µm thick, fully printed, stretchable Hydraulically Amplified Taxels (HAXELs) enable both static indentation and vibrating haptic stimuli, localized to a 2.5 mm diameter region. The HAXELs are directly bonded to the user's skin, are soft enough to conform to any body part, and can be fabricated in dense arrays with no crosstalk. All functional materials (elastomers, stretchable conductors, and sacrificial layers) are deposited by inkjet printing, which allows rapid prototyping of multi‐material, polymer‐based structures. The actuators consist of oil‐filled stretchable pouches, whose shape is controlled by electrostatic zipping. The 5 mm wide actuators weigh <250 mg and generate cutaneous stimuli well above reported perception thresholds, from DC to 1 kHz. They operate well even when stretched to over 50%, allowing great freedom in placement. The 2 × 2 arrays are tested on the fingers of human volunteers: the actuated quadrant is correctly identified 86% of the time. Printing soft actuators allows tailoring dense and effective cutaneous haptics to the unique shape of each user.

3D Printing in LMICs: Functional Design for Upper Limb Prosthetics in Uganda

Meeting the needs of persons with upper limb loss in Uganda requires an understanding of the needs and desires of the local population. The limitations of resources and accessibility for the individual gave rise to a focused design methodology for delivering a culturally acceptable solution using 3D Printing technology. A series of co-design activities were held in Uganda and provided direct feedback to drive the design of two prototypes based on acceptable aesthetics and priority Activities of Daily Living. Two terminal device prototypes were 3D printed in the UK. These can be directly attached to a standard proximal socket thread. The passive hand was printed in a flexible filament and the prehensor was printed in a durable impact resistant material. Local researchers in Uganda have similar 3D printers, filaments, and assembly hardware, which allowed for concurrent development and refinement of the prototypes. Local participation provides a rich user feedback environment to understand which elements of prosthetic device design are integral to delivering acceptable prosthetics solutions for fabrication in Uganda. 3D printing can provide a viable route to addressing the needs of the user. The proposed terminal devices are now in the process of being printed locally for field testing.

Development of a Digital Behavioral Intervention to Reduce the Consumption of Sugar-Sweetened Beverages Among Rural Appalachian Adults: Multiphased, Human-Centered Design Approach

To avoid the low engagement and limited efficacy of digital behavioral health interventions, robust human-centered design (HCD) processes are needed. The primary objective of this study was to describe a flexible, step-by-step HCD process to develop digital behavioral health interventions by illustrating iSIPsmarter as an example. iSIPsmarter is a digital intervention for reducing the consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs) that comprises 6 internet-based cores metered out over time to deliver the program content, an integrated SMS text message strategy to engage users in reporting SSB behaviors, and an electronic cellular-enabled scale for in-home weighing. The secondary objective is to illustrate the key components and characteristics of iSIPsmarter that resulted from the HCD process. The methods were guided by the Model for Internet Interventions and by best practices in HCD and instructional design processes (eg, rapid prototype development and think-aloud protocol). The 3-phased (ie, contextual, prototype testing, end user testing phases) process followed in this study included a series of 13 semistructured one-on-one interviews with 7 advisory team participants from the targeted Appalachian user group. The interviews were content coded by 2 researchers and then deductively coded to the suggested areas of digital behavioral health interventions. The participants provided rich perspectives pertaining to iSIPsmarter's appearance, behavioral prescriptions, burdens, content, delivery, message, participation, and assessment. These inputs included requests for built-in flexibility to account for varying internet and SMS text message accessibility among users; ideas to resolve the issues and problems encountered when using the prototypes, including those related to navigation and comprehension of content; ideas to enhance personalized feedback to support motivation and goal setting for SSB consumption and weight; and feedback to refine the development of realistic and relatable vignettes. The participants were able to interact with multiple prototype drafts, allowing researchers to capture and incorporate feedback related to the iSIPsmarter dashboard, daily SSB and weight diaries, action planning, core content, interactions, and vignettes. Using scientific models and established processes is critical for building robust and efficacious interventions. By applying an existing model and HCD and instructional design processes, we were able to identify assumptions and address the key areas of the iSIPsmarter intervention that were hypothesized to support users' engagement and promote behavior change. As evidenced by the rich feedback received from the advisory team members and the resulting iSIPsmarter product, the HCD methodology was instrumental in the development process. Although the final iSIPsmarter content is specific to improving SSB consumption behaviors among adults in rural areas, the intent is that this HCD process will have wide applications in the development of digital behavioral health interventions across multiple geographic and behavioral contexts.

Meclib: Dynamic and Interactive Figures in STACK Questions Made Easy

Abstract—Making and interpretation of drawings and schematics is an important skill to be developed in engineering education. The question type STACK in the Moodle learning management system combined with the interactive graphics library JSXGraph has a great potential for implementation of e-learning resources addressing these skills in formative and summative settings. The authoring process of such materials is complex due to multiple markup and programming languages like HTML, LaTeX, Maxima and JavaScript (JS) being involved. The Meclib concept mitigates this complexity and allows for efficient bulk production of material with consistent appearance and user experience. The core of Meclib is a set of pre-defined JSXGraph-based objects with an interface to Maxima, such that no problem specific JS code is required at all. The present paper outlines the basic ideas of the implementation and demonstrates the approach for some typical examples of different complexity. The focus is on applications in engineering mechanics, starting from static illustrations up to an editor for free body diagrams, with rich adaptive formative feedback.

Dynamic clustering based contextual combinatorial multi-armed bandit for online recommendation

Recommender systems still face a trade-off between exploring new items to maximize user satisfaction and exploiting those already interacted with to match user interests. This problem is widely recognized as the exploration/exploitation (EE) dilemma, and the multi-armed bandit (MAB) algorithm has proven to be an effective solution. As the scale of users and items in real-world application scenarios increases, their purchase interactions become sparser. Then three issues need to be investigated when building MAB-based recommender systems. First, large-scale users and sparse interactions increase the difficulty of user preference mining. Second, traditional bandits model items as arms and cannot deal with ever-growing items effectively. Third, widely used Bernoulli-based reward mechanisms only feedback 0 or 1, ignoring rich implicit feedback such as behaviors like click and add-to-cart. To address these problems, we propose an algorithm named Dynamic Clustering based Contextual Combinatorial Multi-Armed Bandits (DC3MAB), which consists of three configurable key components. Specifically, a dynamic user clustering strategy enables different users in the same cluster to cooperate in estimating the expected rewards of arms. A dynamic item partitioning approach based on collaborative filtering significantly reduces the scale of arms and produces a recommendation list instead of one item to provide diversity. In addition, a multi-class reward mechanism based on fine-grained implicit feedback helps better capture user preferences. Extensive empirical experiments on three real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of our proposed DC3MAB over state-of-the-art bandits (On average, +75.8% in F1 and +54.3% in cumulative reward). The source code is available at https://github.com/HaixHan/DC3MAB.

Neurorehabilitation Through Synergistic Man-Machine Interfaces Promoting Dormant Neuroplasticity in Spinal Cord Injury: Protocol for a Nonrandomized Controlled Trial.

BackgroundSpinal cord injury (SCI) constitutes a major sociomedical problem, impacting approximately 0.32-0.64 million people each year worldwide; particularly, it impacts young individuals, causing long-term, often irreversible disability. While effective rehabilitation of patients with SCI remains a significant challenge, novel neural engineering technologies have emerged to target and promote dormant neuroplasticity in the central nervous system.ObjectiveThis study aims to develop, pilot test, and optimize a platform based on multiple immersive man-machine interfaces offering rich feedback, including (1) visual motor imagery training under high-density electroencephalographic recording, (2) mountable robotic arms controlled with a wireless brain-computer interface (BCI), (3) a body-machine interface (BMI) consisting of wearable robotics jacket and gloves in combination with a serious game (SG) application, and (4) an augmented reality module. The platform will be used to validate a self-paced neurorehabilitation intervention and to study cortical activity in chronic complete and incomplete SCI at the cervical spine.MethodsA 3-phase pilot study (clinical trial) was designed to evaluate the NeuroSuitUp platform, including patients with chronic cervical SCI with complete and incomplete injury aged over 14 years and age-/sex-matched healthy participants. Outcome measures include BCI control and performance in the BMI-SG module, as well as improvement of functional independence, while also monitoring neuropsychological parameters such as kinesthetic imagery, motivation, self-esteem, depression and anxiety, mental effort, discomfort, and perception of robotics. Participant enrollment into the main clinical trial is estimated to begin in January 2023 and end by December 2023.ResultsA preliminary analysis of collected data during pilot testing of BMI-SG by healthy participants showed that the platform was easy to use, caused no discomfort, and the robotics were perceived positively by the participants. Analysis of results from the main clinical trial will begin as recruitment progresses and findings from the complete analysis of results are expected in early 2024.ConclusionsChronic SCI is characterized by irreversible disability impacting functional independence. NeuroSuitUp could provide a valuable complementary platform for training in immersive rehabilitation methods to promote dormant neural plasticity.Trial RegistrationClinicalTrials.gov NCT05465486; https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT05465486International Registered Report Identifier (IRRID)PRR1-10.2196/41152