Deans' stroke musings: A survey on robotic devices for upper limb 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.

Friday, January 10, 2014

A survey on robotic devices for upper limb rehabilitation

After your doctor reviews this there should be some new devices requested for the therapy gym at the hospital. Unless your doctor is a slug, not willing to do anything innovative because that would require learning something new.

11 pages of devices that your doctor should already know about.

http://www.jneuroengrehab.com/content/11/1/3/abstract

Pawe¿ Maciejasz, Jörg Eschweiler, Kurt Gerlach-Hahn, Arne Jansen-Toy and Steffen Leonhardt

Author Affiliations

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Journal of NeuroEngineering and Rehabilitation 2014, 11:3 doi:10.1186/1743-0003-11-3
Published: 9 January 2014

Abstract (provisional)

The existing shortage of therapists and caregivers assisting physically disabled individuals at home is expected to increase and become serious problem in the near future. The patient population needing physical rehabilitation of the upper extremity is also constantly increasing. Robotic devices have the potential to address this problem as noted by the results of recent research studies. However, the availability of these devices in clinical settings is limited, leaving plenty of room for improvement. The purpose of this paper is to document a review of robotic devices for upper limb rehabilitation including those in developing phase in order to provide a comprehensive reference about existing solutions and facilitate the development of new and improved devices. In particular the following issues are discussed: application field, target group, type of assistance, mechanical design, control strategy and clinical evaluation. This paper also includes a comprehensive, tabulated comparison of technical solutions implemented in various systems.