Low-cost technology might make better the rehab for stroke victims

New technology being established at the Tandon School of Engineering at New York University is made to assist stroke victims more rapidly to regain lost motor qualities compared with traditional therapies.

The technology, projected to charge $1,000 for per unit, can be placed in sufferer homes, negating the requirement for frequent trips to a hospital or clinic for rehabilitation.

The project utilizes “mechatronic devices,” which is a marriage of mechanical and electrical engineering disciplines to generate smart products with embedded intelligence, claims Vikram Kapila, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at NYU’s Tandon School of Engineering. An instance of such tools is airbags in a car, he elaborates. Sensors track a crash, and the bags deploy.

Stroke sufferers mostly lose functionality in their arms and hands; it is complex to choose a glass or to know if sufficient pressure is being placed on the glass to keep it from falling. A sufferer might have lost functionality in the right hand, but has the proposed functionality in the left hand.

The idea behind the project is to begin with the good left hand doing an activity and then transferring data gathered by wearable mechatronic devices to the right hand. These tools involve a jacket to measure arm placement and a glove to measure wrist and finger placement and finger joint angles. Other measures, like grasping force and lifting force, also are gathered.

When a sufferer conducts an exercise, like lifting a water bottle, microcontrollers quantify the action and measure grip strength, with data reflected on a small computer-like tabletop device that enables a sufferer and clinicians to observe the force being applied to lift the bottle or do a different activity.

Wearing a proposed jacket embedded with sensors, a sufferer will utilize the good left hand to lift the bottle with the extreme force of lifting and grasping charted. If too much force is implemented, a ball on the tabletop tool will turn red. If medium correct force is implemented, the ball will turn yellow, and if correct force is implemented, the ball will turn green. The key task is to attempt to replicate those measures with the disabled right hand.

With repetition, doing the activities with the good left hand over time will enable the brain to transfer data from the left hand to the right hand so it can do the similar activity. Data gathered by smartphone also can be transmitted to a physician or physical therapist to detect growth and change therapy processes if essential. There are several separate modules for these exercises covering the hand, arm and fingers.

The emerging technology also has an economical advantage for physicians and therapists, Kapila claims. A clinician can do one rehabilitation treatment at a period in an office and bill once for the treatment. But if various sufferers are at home doing the rehabilitation and sending outcomes to a clinician through email or a text image, the clinician can bill for each of those home-deployed rehab sessions.

The project is presently being performed by students and faculty, but funds are being sought to shift the concept from the lab to a pilot project with rehabilitation clinics and sufferer in their homes, after which feedback will be gathered and any essential improvements will be made. The objective is to have fifty devices being piloted. Entire materials, involving smartphones, lithium batteries and sensors are off the shelf or open source products.

Just in the United States of America, the project has the possibility to serve 300,000 sufferers yearly, Kapila states, and once commercialized the expectation is to get 1 or 2% of that market in the 1^st year after getting regulatory approvals.