TeMoRett

Rett syndrome is a very rare genetic disorder that predominantly affects girls. A central complaint of girls and women with Rett syndrome is movement disorders of the hands in addition to cognitive deficits. This leads to considerable limitations in simple everyday activities such as eating independently, and thus significantly reduces social participation. The severity of such impairments in terms of intended hand movements through e.g. stereotypes such as repeated 'handwashing' movements can vary greatly. Personalisable and adaptive exercises can support the development of voluntary hand movements as well as the reduction of stereotypes. TeMoRett therefore follows a therapy approach that is fun and can also be used at home with little effort.

This project aims to develop technical methods for entertaining exercise programs in which small, intended hand movements are automatically recognized and positively reinforced by reward: The technical challenge here is that the extent of possible movement and control varies greatly from person to person. In addition, the input technologies used must not be intrusive in order to distract the patients as little as possible. Furthermore, the costs must be kept as low as possible for use at home.

Therefore, the development of a video-based movement tracking system with simple cameras in combination with customized image processing and adapted learning algorithms is planned. The aim is to robustly capture individual hand postures and track hand movements with a high spatio-temporal accuracy to enable accurate quantification of improvement.

A subsequent core element of the project is found in the reward system (e.g. multimedia output), which can be individually adapted to comprehensively support the test persons. The degree of difficulty is to increase adaptively ("shaping"), depending on the performance in the previous sessions. The game content should be presented on the table in front of the participants using projective extended reality (XR) methods.

• Fraunhofer HHI
• Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Science (Leipzig)
• Department of Pediatric Neurology and Social Paediatric Centre (Berlin) of the Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin
• Georgetown University Medical Center (Washington, D.C., USA)
• Rett Syndrom Deutschland e.V. (Rösrath)