Deans' stroke musings: Combining mental training and physical training with goal oriented protocols in stroke rehabilitation: a feasibility case study

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.

Monday, March 26, 2018

Combining mental training and physical training with goal oriented protocols in stroke rehabilitation: a feasibility case study

Once again your doctor has absolutely nothing to do to get you recovered. You are completely on your own to figure out your 100% recovery.
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2018.00125/abstract

Xin Zhang¹,

Ahmed M. Elnady¹,

Bubble K. Randhawa¹,

Lara Boyd² and

Carlo Menon^1*

¹School of Engineering Science, Simon Fraser University, Canada
²University of British Columbia, Canada

Stroke is one of the leading causes of permanent disability in adults. The literature suggests that rehabilitation is key to early motor recovery. However, conventional therapy is labor and cost intensive. Robotic and functional electrical stimulation (FES) devices can provide a high dose of repetitions and as such may provide an alternative, or an adjunct, to conventional rehabilitation therapy. Brain-computer interfaces (BCI) could augment neuroplasticity by introducing mental training. However, mental training alone is not enough; but combining mental with physical training could boost outcomes. In the current case study, a portable rehabilitative platform and goal-oriented supporting training protocols were introduced and tested with a chronic stroke participant. A novel training method was introduced with the proposed rehabilitative platform. A 37-year old individual with chronic stroke participated in six-weeks of training (18 sessions in total, 3 sessions a week, and one hour per session). In this case study, we show that an individual with chronic stroke can tolerate a six-week training bout with our system and protocol. The participant was actively engaged throughout the training. Changes in the Wolf Motor Function Test (WMFT) suggest that the training positively affected arm motor function (12% improvement in WMFT score).

Keywords: mental training, physical training, BCI, exoskeleton, FES, stroke rehablitation

Received: 07 Dec 2017; Accepted: 16 Mar 2018.

Edited by:

Stephane Perrey, Université de Montpellier, France

Reviewed by:

Silmar Teixeira, Federal University of Piauí, Brazil
Kyuhwa Lee, Campus Biotech, Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule, Switzerland

Copyright: © 2018 Zhang, Elnady, Randhawa, Boyd and Menon. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

* Correspondence: Dr. Carlo Menon, Simon Fraser University, School of Engineering Science, Burnaby, V5A 1S6, British Columbia, Canada, cmenon@sfu.ca