Restoring Voluntary Bimanual Activities of Patients with Chronic Hemiparesis through a Foot-Controlled Hand/Forearm Exoskeleton

Have your doctor check this out.

 Restoring Voluntary Bimanual Activities of Patients with Chronic Hemiparesis through a Foot-Controlled Hand/Forearm Exoskeleton

Wenyuan Chen, Guangyong Li, Member, IEEE, Ning Li, Wenxue Wang, Member, IEEE, Peng Yu, Ruiqian Wang,
Xiujuan Xue, Xingang zhao, and Lianqing Liu, Member, IEEE,

Abstract—

A significant number of stroke patients are permanently left with a hemiparetic upper limb after the post stroke
six-month golden recovery period, resulting in a drastic decline
in their quality of life. This study develops a novel foot-controlled
hand/forearm exoskeleton that enables patients with hemiparetic
hands and forearms to restore their voluntary activities of daily
living. Patients can accomplish dexterous hand/arm manipulation
on their own with the assistance of a foot-controlled hand/forearm
exoskeleton by utilizing foot movements on the unaffected side as
command signals. The proposed foot-controlled exoskeleton was
first tested on a stroke patient with a chronic hemiparetic upper
limb. The testing results showed that the forearm exoskeleton can
assist the patient in achieving approximately 107◦of voluntary
forearm rotation with a static control error less than 1.7◦,
whereas the hand exoskeleton can assist the patient in realizing
at least six different voluntary hand gestures with a success
rate of 100%. Further experiments involving more patients
demonstrated that the foot-controlled hand/forearm exoskeleton
can help patients in restoring some of the voluntary activities of
daily living with their paretic upper limb, such as picking up food
to eat and opening water bottles to drink, and etc. This research
implies that the foot-controlled hand/forearm exoskeleton is a
viable way to restore the upper limb activities of stroke patients
with chronic hemiparesis.

 

Various pictures at link.