Stroke represents a severe, widespread, and widely acknowledged health crisis on both national and international levels. It is one of the most prevalent life-threatening conditions. Despite impressive advances in treating stroke, in addition to a need for effective patient care services, many sufferers still rely solely on physical interventions. The present paper describes and explains the use of a newly designed gadget for stroke survivors who cannot move their fingers. This is a sophisticated mobile device that enables stroke patients to regain their muscle memory and thus their ability to perform repetitive actions by continuing to tighten and stretch their muscles without the intervention of a physiotherapist. Gamification methodology is used to encourage patients to become involved in the process of rehabilitation. The device also has sensors that take information and transmit it to an app through an ESP32 connection. This enables physicians to view glove usage information remotely and keep track of an individual patient’s health. Communication between app and glove is facilitated by a broker in the Amazon Web Service IoT. With the robotic glove presented here, the recovery rate is found to be 90.23% over four weeks’ duration, which represents a significant improvement compared with existing hospital-based rehabilitation techniques.

  1. New design gadget for stroke survivors to tighten and stretch muscles

  2. Rehabilitation unit enables physicians to view glove usage information remotely

  3. The recovery rate is improved in terms of weeks for the patient

Topics
Sensors, Information technology, Robotics, User interfaces, Natural materials, Polymers, Birds, Diseases and conditions, Musculoskeletal system, Therapeutics

Smart gloves are a kind of portable device designed for supporting stroke patients with the aim of improving their living standards. These gloves help patients regain muscle memory through constantly release and contraction of their muscles.1 When patients are attempting to maintain the function of their arms and recapture the associated muscle memory, it is quite difficult for them to move their fingers backward and forward.2 With smart gloves, the appropriate exercises can be performed and feedback can be sent instantly for physicians to evaluate the patient’s performance.

Stroke patients who require rehabilitation need to go through several physiotherapy sessions in order to achieve the objective.3 Such physiotherapy can be a very challenging and draining process for the patient, who needs to travel from their home to the hospital or facility where the treatment is to take place. As the majority of rehabilitation patients are older,4 they find travel difficult. Another issue is the size and weight of the therapeutic equipment required for physiotherapy, which is also not easily transported from place to place.5 Both of these issues make rehabilitation a very tiring and expensive process. It is with the aim of making rehabilitation for stroke survivors easier6 and more affordable that the smart rehabilitation gloves described in this paper have been designed.

A smart glove only weighs around 200 g. Based on how long the glove is being used, the usage statistics of the patient will automatically be sent to a user interface (UI), and an app has been created specifically for this purpose.7 Both the doctor and patient can directly view this data from the UI and app. This eliminates the need for the patient to travel to a physiotherapy center.8 These smart gloves costs around 4000 INR, which is just one-tenth of the total money spent on physiotherapy. The need to visit the doctor every so often to discuss changes that need to be made for future physiotherapy sessions is completely eliminated by using smart gloves.9 The glove collects gauntlet activity data and transfers it to the Amazon Web Service (AWS) cloud, where it is both recorded and sent to the UI and app.10 The doctor will then be able to view the glove usage statistics of each patient and give them appropriate feedback on further glove usage. The patient will be able to view the doctor’s feedback directly in the UI and app.11 In this design, there are two interfaces: a physical one and a virtual one.

The physical interface layer consist of textured cotton gloves that help the wearer grip better, an ESP32 microcontroller (a low-cost but powerful module integrated with a low-power system),12,13 a dual Wi-Fi and Bluetooth facility, pneumatic “muscles” that function as contractile or extensional devices operated by air pressure in a bladder, a pneumatic pump using pressurized gas or air, hinge clamps on each finger to hold the pneumatic “muscles” at the correct positions, braided nylon cable to maintain stability, a flex sensor to detect the stress applied to it, and a manifold valve that receives input from a source and transmit outputs to multiple destinations.14 The virtual layer consists of the AWS cloud services and the UI/app that enables doctor and patient to view usage statistics. Thus, this design enables physicians to view glove usage information and keep track of their patient’s health.

The major contributions of the proposed glove can be summarized as follows:

  • Its main purpose is to assist stroke patients who are unable to move their hands by providing them with greater engagement and stability.

  • It enables analysis of existing stroke rehabilitation procedures and thus provide a basis for the development of a more efficient and patient-friendly rehabilitation method.

  • Sensors on the glove collect information and transmit it to a processor and a Digital Twin via the ESP32 microcontroller.

  • Patient’s glove usage information collected by the interface enables a physician to monitor the patient’s status.

  • The use of this glove will speed up patients’ recovery and enable them to follow an appropriate treatment plan.

The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. Section II describes related work, particularly with regard to various techniques related to stroke rehabilitation. Section III demonstrates the proposed methodology, and Sec. IV presents experimental results obtained with the glove.

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