The Organising Committee of the XXIII SIAMOC Congress announces a competition for the award of a prize for the best scientific paper presented at the Congress and related to the topic "The telemedicine service in support of the motion analysis laboratory'. The prize, financed by the company BTS Engineering, consists of in a 12-month subscription to the BTS TELEREHAB platform.
Candidates for the competition will be those authors who have expressed their intention to compete when sending of the abstract to the congress.

The selection procedure will take place according to the following two phases, detailed below:

• the first, prior to the Congress, concerns the anonymous evaluation of the abstracts by reviewers established by the Congress Scientific Committee and does not differ from the standard procedure to which all abstracts all abstracts submitted to the Congress are subjected to;

•  the second, during the Congress, concerns the overall evaluation of the papers, including the presentation in oral or poster form, by a specially constituted committee.

 

With regard to the pre-congress evaluation phase, the evaluation methods set out in the Guidelines for the Organisation of the SIAMOC National Congress for all contributions submitted to the congress, so that each paper will be evaluated by the committee set up for this purpose.
Congress, whereby each paper will be sent to at least 2 reviewers together with the evaluation form. I reviewers will normally be the members of the Congress Scientific Committee themselves. The distribution of the papers received among the various reviewers will be made by the President of the Congress. Will be asked to reviewers to verify that the papers nominated for the BTS Congressional Award are indeed related to the specific theme of the award, such as 'The telemedicine service in support of the motion analysis laboratory'. In the event that
candidate work does not focus on this topic, the work will not be considered for the
award. Only papers nominated for the award with a score greater than or equal to the median score of all abstracts will be eligible for the second evaluation phase.

As far as the congress evaluation phase is concerned, the following rules are established:

• The Congress Organising Committee appoints the President of the evaluation commission; the name of the President of the commission will not be made public before the announcement of the winners. Subsequently, the President of the Committee (or his delegate) will handle relations with the author submitting the work and with the contact person for the prize communicated by the author;

• The President selects and appoints the three members of the award evaluation commission, so that it, including the President, consists of two members with clinical training and two members with technical training; the names of the commission members will not be made public;

• The President of the Congress shall provide the President of the committee with the list of only those papers with an above-threshold score participating in the award, with the indication of the session and time of presentation and without the scores given to the abstracts by the reviewers during the acceptance phase, so as not to influence the evaluators in the second evaluation phase. These scores will subsequently be provided to the President of the committee in time to draw up the final ranking list;

• Each member of the committee, including the President, shall award each paper entered in the competition a grade in thirtieths, using the same logic with which grades are given at university. The following will be taken into account in the evaluation of the work: the scientific quality of the work, the relevance of the topics covered with those defined by the award and the expository skills of the presenting author;

• Commissioners will refrain from marking papers of which they are authors or co-authors or of which one or more authors are from the same department/research unit;

• To the four marks awarded by the committee will subsequently be added the score (in thirtieths) awarded by the reviewers in the first evaluation phase;

• At the end of the presentations, the committee will rank the assessed works by calculating the average of the marks awarded (these will be five or less, four from the committee and one from the preliminary evaluation, given in thirtieths) to one decimal place;

• In the event that the second and third, or the third and fourth classified have obtained the same average mark, the committee shall eliminate the ex-aequo situation by means of a collegial evaluation. If it is not possible to reach a conclusion by majority vote, the assessment of the chairman of the committee will be decisive;The top three classified papers will be announced at the closing ceremony of the Congress and will be listed, complete with the names of their authors, on the SIAMOC website;

• The work with the highest score will be awarded the title 'Winner/Winner of the BTS Congress Award - The telemedicine service in support of the movement analysis laboratory'.

Following the nomination of the winning work, the author who submitted the contribution will be asked to indicate and communicate to the President of the Congress and to the SIAMOC President a contact person for the management of the award and of the subsequent details relating to the stipulation of the annual subscription contract for the BTS TELEREHAB platform.
This contact person will be put in touch by the President of the Congress with the contact person for the prize at BTS Engineering.
The terms for the award will be agreed independently between the two contacts and subsequently communicated to the President of the Congress and to the SIAMOC President.