Deans' stroke musings: Bilateral robots for upper-limb stroke rehabilitation: State of the art and future prospects

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.

Saturday, April 30, 2016

Bilateral robots for upper-limb stroke rehabilitation: State of the art and future prospects

This is a review article so your doctor should already have read and updated your stroke protocols based on those earlier research trials. And pigs fly. You're screwed.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1350453316300480

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doi:10.1016/j.medengphy.2016.04.004

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Highlights

•: A comprehensive overview of robot mechanism for bilateral upper-limb rehabilitation robots since 1993.
•: A systematic overview of clinical trials (total 34 randomized controlled trials and 877 participants) and effectiveness for robots described above.
•: Several suggestions of robot mechanisms, clinical trials and directions for further researches.

Abstract

Robot-assisted bilateral upper-limb training grows abundantly for stroke rehabilitation in recent years and an increasing number of devices and robots have been developed. This paper aims to provide a systematic overview and evaluation of existing bilateral upper-limb rehabilitation devices and robots based on their mechanisms and clinical-outcomes. Most of the articles studied here were searched from nine online databases and the China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) from year 1993 to 2015. Devices and robots were categorized as end-effectors, exoskeletons and industrial robots. Totally ten end-effectors, one exoskeleton and one industrial robot were evaluated in terms of their mechanical characteristics, degrees of freedom (DOF), supported control modes, clinical applicability and outcomes. Preliminary clinical results of these studies showed that all participants could gain certain improvements in terms of range of motion, strength or physical function after training. Only four studies supported that bilateral training was better than unilateral training. However, most of clinical results cannot definitely verify the effectiveness of mechanisms and clinical protocols used in robotic therapies. To explore the actual value of these robots and devices, further research on ingenious mechanisms, dose-matched clinical protocols and universal evaluation criteria should be conducted in the future.

Keywords

Rehabilitation robot;
Upper-limb;
Bilateral training;
Clinical protocols

: Corresponding author at: Department of Mechanical Engineering, the University of Auckland, 20 Symonds Street, Auckland city, New Zealand. Tel.: +64 9 9238143.