Deans' stroke musings: Develop a wearable ankle robot for in-bed acute stroke rehabilitation

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.

Saturday, August 27, 2011

Develop a wearable ankle robot for in-bed acute stroke rehabilitation

Boy does this make a lot of sense, especially with all the downtime a survivor spends in bed with no therapy available. I used something similar to this when I was in a research study on ankle movement,
I was trying to follow a jagged line while in an MRI machine. It was difficult since I wasn't wearing my glasses and things were quite blurry. Pictures at the URL.
http://embc2011.embs.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/

unconference-demo-EMBS2011-RIC.pdf?
ACUTE stroke survivors are actively trained with activities helpful for recovery of mobility in only 13% of the time and they are left alone in more than 60% of the time in early post-acute rehabilitation window [1]. Considering the first few months post stroke is critical in stroke recovery (neuroplasticity) [2], there is a strong need for active movement therapy and manipulate/mobilize the joints early in acute stroke rehabilitation. This project seeks a feasible solution which can meet this clinic need and deliver well-controlled passive stretching and motivating active movement therapy with robotic assistance/resistance for better motor re-learning in acute stage.