Fondazione TOG - living to care and caring to live
A multidisciplinary, state-of-the-art rehabilitation foundation
Fondazione TOG is a non-profit organization in Milan that provides free rehabilitation services to children with serious neurological conditions.
Founded in 2011, they recently opened a new, large center with advanced technology.
They focus on helping children with motor, cognitive, behavioral and communication problems through personalized rehabilitation plans. Since these conditions are complex and require early intervention, TOG offers intensive therapy to maximize its impact. Their goal is to improve the children’s quality of life and future opportunities. Additionally, TOG acts as a supplement to public healthcare by providing free, high-quality treatment. They even offer support services to help young adults leaving the program transition into the workforce.
The Mission for which TOG was founded and the reasons that drive us with determination to carry out this work today are rooted in the conviction that rehabilitation plays a capital role in the lives of children with complex neurological pathologies.
As soon as the child is taken into care, the TOG Centre’s team of excellence identifies the specific needs that need to be worked on and provides all the necessary therapies in which the Foundation specialises.
We experimented with the exercises and then proposed them to the children. The important things are the systematic exploration of the event, of what was being represented, the naming of the elements and recognition of the environment, a definition of the task (we define a task but then ask the child to redefine it), a collection of data, a lexical enrichment (stimulating the retrieval of information).
A greater openness of observation and analysis is required, and therefore greater attention to the stimulus (even if it is repeated), favouring an increase in attention spans and the expansion of vocabulary relating to things or situations, elements that the child did not know and learns to know. At the centre is therefore the accuracy and precision in the control of the gesture: a different movement, greater precision and refinement and a strong hold on reaching the goal.
For years, TOG has been using technology in the service of rehabilitation to significantly improve the quality of life of young patients with brain injuries.TOG ensures its staff is constantly updated and is open to renewing itself and learning new techniques in order to be able to offer the best treatment.
From this point of view, in addition to the activity already carried out with virtual reality visors, there are the workshops, the service offered by the swimming pool and the ongoing experimentation on eye tracking.
NIRVANA allows the child to have an immersive experience with active learning: he/she lives a stimulating and immersive experience, receives continuous auditory-visual feedback from the system that keeps his/her motivation high; furthermore, the children do not need any support and therefore feel very free to move both on the wall and on the floor without aids. In this sense, the ability to modify the activity in real time, both in terms of difficulty and the stimuli presented, is indispensable.
The NIRVANA room is always a great surprise in its ability to stimulate curiosity and the desire for activation on the part of all children, in a practice that is always highly motivating.
It consists of wall or carpet work and is focused on fine-tuning the cognitive-linguistic part, leaving the motor part more in the background. The aim is to move from qualitative analysis (already applied) to quantitative analysis (using the appropriate software).
“The NIRVANA room is always a great surprise in its ability to stimulate curiosity and the desire for engagement among all children, providing a consistently motivating experience.“
BTS is a company that has always been willing to provide both technical and creative support and with whom we have always maintained an ongoing collaboration. NIRVANA allows effective measurement of motor response and is a very dynamic and motivating device for patients, ensuring active learning, a wide variety of stimuli and the development of curiosity in the child. From this perspective, the results are amazing: the child’s surprise is constant and this ensures that he or she is motivated and active. That with BTS is an ongoing collaboration, not taken for granted and based on openness and familiarity.
