Changing stroke rehab and research worldwide now.Time is Brain! trillions and trillions of neurons that DIE each day because there are NO effective hyperacute therapies besides tPA(only 12% effective). I have 523 posts on hyperacute therapy, enough for researchers to spend decades proving them out. These are my personal ideas and blog on stroke rehabilitation and stroke research. Do not attempt any of these without checking with your medical provider. Unless you join me in agitating, when you need these therapies they won't be there.

What this blog is for:

My blog is not to help survivors recover, it is to have the 10 million yearly stroke survivors light fires underneath their doctors, stroke hospitals and stroke researchers to get stroke solved. 100% recovery. The stroke medical world is completely failing at that goal, they don't even have it as a goal. Shortly after getting out of the hospital and getting NO information on the process or protocols of stroke rehabilitation and recovery I started searching on the internet and found that no other survivor received useful information. This is an attempt to cover all stroke rehabilitation information that should be readily available to survivors so they can talk with informed knowledge to their medical staff. It lays out what needs to be done to get stroke survivors closer to 100% recovery. It's quite disgusting that this information is not available from every stroke association and doctors group.

Friday, April 29, 2011

Using technology to optimize recovery in upper limb stroke rehabilitation

I'm not sure I believe the blanket statement that a skilled therapist is better than technologies. Parts may be true, but finding that skilled therapist is nigh onto impossible. And with millions needing therapy there will never be enough extremely skilled ones. There is a Bell curve you know, not everyone can be above average.
http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/22228/


Abstract
A skilled therapist working one-to-one with a patient for one or two hours a day may be an ideal environment to optimize recovery of upper limb function following stroke and is likely to be superior to technologies that ‘replace the therapist’. Repeated studies have found that there is no single therapeutic approach that is more effective than any other, but intensity is critical. The recent Randomized Controlled Trial of the MIT Manus, published by Lo et al, found that robot therapy was not superior to intensive conventional therapy. Given that one-to-one intensive therapy is unaffordable can technology be used to improve outcome and if so how? The key factors appear to be: increasing intensity of practice; motivating patients to maximize engagement, effort and compliance; performance of functional and relevant tasks; increasing Central Nervous System (CNS) excitability and early intervention. The evidence that technologies can be used to deliver on these key factors will be discussed and in particular the evidence and potential for combined therapies such as electrical stimulation (both peripheral and transcranial direct current stimulation [tDCS]) with robot therapy will be presented.

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