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