Deans' stroke musings: Design of a low-pressure pneumatically actuated soft robotic glove to facilitate bilateral training in 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.

Thursday, May 14, 2020

Design of a low-pressure pneumatically actuated soft robotic glove to facilitate bilateral training in stroke rehabilitation

So you designed something. WHOM are you going to go to to get this built and then run clinical trials in comparison to these other gloves/ hand rehab options? Otherwise this is totally useless.

EsoGlove (1)

FES-Robotic Glove (1)

glove (71)

HERO Grip Glove (1)

music glove (1)

Gyroscopic glove (1)

RAPAEL Smart Glove (4)

Rapael Smart Gloves (1)

SaeboGlove (1)

hand (234)

Hand dryer (1)

Hand exercises (4)

hand grip (1)

Hand Laterality Judgment Ta/sk (1)

Hand Mentor Pro (1)

hand neuroprosthesis (1)

hand opening (3)

hand recovery (5)

hand splint (1)

hand therapy (1)

hand washing (2)

hand weakness (1)

Citation

Gerges, F. 2020. Design of a low-pressure pneumatically actuated soft robotic glove to facilitate bilateral training in stroke rehabilitation -- In Proceedings: 16th Annual Symposium on Graduate Research and Scholarly Projects. Wichita, KS: Wichita State University, p.30

Abstract

Stroke is one of the leading causes of long-term disability worldwide. As a result of this injury, many stroke survivors will experience some degree of paralysis immediately after the injury, such as lost hand motor function. Throughout the last decade, researchers have been working on improving existing rehabilitation techniques and assistive hand exoskeleton technologies to encourage a faster motor function recovery to those patients who lost hand motor functions. However, many clinics still rely on old rehabilitative rigid hand exoskeleton, which is not very effective during the recovery of the patient. This paper proposes a design of a low pressure soft robotic glove as an assistive device to facilitate bilateral hand training during stroke rehabilitation. In the bilateral hand training therapy, a movement in the healthy hand generates a similar movement in the parietal hand through the robotic glove. Researchers found that the activation of both cerebral hemispheres in rehabilitation exercises improves outcomes significantly. In order to create the robotic glove, a design of soft actuators that are pneumatically actuated and can achieve high flexion forces is proposed. The mechanical performance of the actuator was analyzed based on its blocked tip force capabilities and its capability in supporting the full range of motion of the fingers. The current actuator prototype is capable of producing 9.5 N force at the fingertip when pressurized to 99.5 kPa, which is enough to assist the parietal hand in performing rehabilitation exercises. Then, a master-slave controller is proposed to facilitate bilateral hand training such that a glove (master) with flex sensors is used to detect a movement in the healthy hand and use this information to generate a similar movement on the soft robotic glove that is worn on the parietal hand. The glove was successful in meeting the design requirements and in assisting a healthy patient in performing a pinch, tripod pinch, and full grasp movements.