Deans' stroke musings: A Portable Gait Asymmetry Rehabilitation System for Individuals with Stroke Using a Vibrotactile Feedback

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.

Tuesday, May 26, 2015

A Portable Gait Asymmetry Rehabilitation System for Individuals with Stroke Using a Vibrotactile Feedback

So WHOM is going to take on the challenge of creating a stroke walking protocol? I've only written 297 posts on walking
and 33 on gait, gait analysis, gait symmetry
The knowledge is out there, our physical therapists need to step up to the challenge and create something useful for every stroke survivor trying to walk again. This is so f*cking easy to solve. You create a walking protocol, as problems are found you update it. This is not rocket science. Quit relying on the crutch of saying, 'All strokes are different, all stroke recoveries are different'.
http://www.hindawi.com/journals/bmri/aa/375638/
Muhammad Raheel Afzal,1 Min-Kyun Oh,2 Chang-Hee Lee,2 Young Sook Park,3 and Jungwon Yoon1

1School of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering & ReCAPT, Gyeongsang National University, Jinju 660701, Republic of Korea
2Department of Rehabilitation Medicine, Gyeongsang National University Hospital, Jinju 660702, Republic of Korea
3Departments of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, Samsung Changwon Hospital, Sungkyunkwan University School of Medicine, Changwon 630723, Republic of Korea

Received 30 January 2015; Revised 21 April 2015; Accepted 28 April 2015

Academic Editor: Stephen Goss

Copyright © 2015 Muhammad Raheel Afzal et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Abstract

Gait asymmetry caused by hemiparesis results in reduced gait efficiency and reduced activity levels. In this paper, a portable rehabilitation device is proposed that can serve as a tool in diagnosing gait abnormalities in individuals with stroke and has the capability of providing vibration feedback to help compensate for the asymmetric gait. Force-sensitive resistor (FSR) based insoles are used to detect ground contact and estimate stance time. A controller (Arduino) provides different vibration feedback based on the gait phase measurement. It also allows wireless interaction with a personal computer (PC) workstation using the XBee transceiver module, featuring data logging capabilities for subsequent analysis. Walking trials conducted with healthy young subjects allowed us to observe that the system can influence abnormality in the gait. The results of trials showed that a vibration cue based on temporal information was more effective than intensity information. With clinical experiments conducted for individuals with stroke, significant improvement in gait symmetry was observed with minimal disturbance caused to the balance and gait speed as an effect of the biofeedback. Future studies of the long-term rehabilitation effects of the proposed system and further improvements to the system will result in an inexpensive, easy-to-use, and effective rehabilitation device.