SMART Hand Rehabilitation after Stroke

12/03/2024

Traditional Mirror Therapy (MT) is a rehabilitation technique that uses the reflection of a patient’s unaffected limb to encourage movement in the affected limb, promoting neural recovery after a stroke. With the development of robotics and the creation of the MIT-MANUS, a new field emerged: Robotic Mirror Therapy (RMT). However, several of these devices are not suitable for Point-of-Care (POC) as they are too expensive, cumbersome, and difficult for post-stroke patients to don and doff independently. Our system integrates a 21-Degree-of-Freedom (DoF) parallel manipulator (5 active DoF) and a motion sensor, paired with a Virtual Reality (VR) piano task. This design is portable, affordable, and user-friendly, making it more accessible for POC therapy. The VR piano tasks are based on Discrete Sequence Progress Tasks (DSPTs), which engage the brain regions responsible for executing fast sequential actions the same as the ones used in Activities of Daily Living (ADL). The system operates in a master-slave configuration, where the master (motion sensor) captures the movement of the unaffected hand, and the slave (manipulator) mirrors these movements on the affected hand, creating a closed neurological loop. This RMT approach reinforces neural pathways by engaging both limbs in the rehabilitation process. Tested with 16 healthy participants, our system’s RMT showed potential for motor skill acquisition, particularly in task performance, outperforming its RT counterpart. However, RMT fell short in motor control improvement and did not surpass the effectiveness of classical MT, which yielded the best results in both motor skill and control refinement.

Authors in the community:

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  A

  Afonso Maria Soares Moita de Deus de Araújo

  ist196138

Supervisors of this institution:

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  A

  Alexandre José Malheiro Bernardino

  ist13761

• 

  A

  Athanasios Vourvopoulos

  ist428516

electrical-engineering-electronic-engineering-information-engineering - Electrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineering

eng - English

Instituto Superior Técnico