Deans' stroke musings: Robotic arm rehabilitation in chronic stroke patients with aphasia may promote speech and language recovery

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.

Tuesday, October 2, 2018

Robotic arm rehabilitation in chronic stroke patients with aphasia may promote speech and language recovery

Novel idea, will your hospital implement this without your prodding?

Robotic arm rehabilitation in chronic stroke patients with aphasia may promote speech and language recovery

Adam Buchwald^1*,

Carolyn Falconer¹,

Avrielle Rykman²,

Mar Cortes²,

Alvaro Pascual-Leone³, Gary Thickbroom²,

Hermano I. Krebs⁴, Linda M. Gerber², Clara Oromendia²,

Johanna Chang⁵,

Bruce T. Volpe⁵ and

Dylan Edwards²

¹New York University, United States
²Weill Cornell Medicine, Cornell University, United States
³Harvard Medical School, United States
⁴Department of Mechanical Engineering,Massachusetts Institute of Technology, United States
⁵Feinstein Institute for Medical Research, United States

Objective: This study aimed to determine the extent to which robotic arm rehabilitation for chronic stroke may promote recovery of speech and language function in individuals with aphasia.
Methods: We prospectively enrolled 17 individuals in a robotic arm rehabilitation study and evaluated their speech and language performance before and after a 12-week (36 session) arm treatment regimen. Performance changes were evaluated with paired t-tests comparing pre- and post-test measures. There was no speech therapy included in the treatment protocol.
Results: Overall, the individuals significantly improved on measures of motor speech production as well as overall aphasia severity from pre-test baseline to post-test.
Conclusions: This work indicates the importance of considering approaches to stroke rehabilitation across different domains of impairment, and warrants additional exploration of the possibility that robotic arm motor treatment may enhance rehabilitation for speech and language outcomes.

Keywords: Aphasia, stroke rehabilitation, apraxia of speech, motor control, Neurorehabilitation

Received: 29 Jan 2018; Accepted: 21 Sep 2018.

Edited by:
Nicola Smania, Università degli Studi di Verona, Italy

Reviewed by:
Kyrana Tsapkini, Johns Hopkins University, United States
Andrea Turolla, IRCCS Fondazione Ospedale San Camillo, Italy

Copyright: © 2018 Buchwald, Falconer, Rykman, Cortes, Pascual-Leone, Thickbroom, Krebs, Gerber, Oromendia, Chang, Volpe and Edwards. 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(s) 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: Prof. Adam Buchwald, New York University, New York City, United States, buchwald@nyu.edu