GripAble: The mobile video game for stroke rehabilitation

But is it better that these other video games? If you can't get the answer your hospital is incompetent.

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GripAble: The mobile video game for stroke rehabilitation

Tech start-up GripAble has created a mobile video game for stroke rehabilitation that's billed as more engaging and exciting for patients, while providing better information for doctors

GripAble is a mobile video game for stroke rehabilitation

Physical therapy equipment has remained unchanged for decades – but now a tech start-up has created a mobile video game for stroke rehabilitation.
GripAble hopes to “gamify” treatment for patients recovering from the life-threatening condition by creating a squeezable controller that helps regain mobility in a user’s hand that can used in its own range of platform games and objective-based assessments.
About 900,000 people in the UK are living with the effects of a stroke – which occurs when the blood supply to part of the brain is cut off – and 70% of those exhibit slow motor movement in their hands.
Physiotherapy is used to help regain strength in the hands and reduce the muscle spasms that make movement stiff and painful.

Dr Paul Rinne, a clinical neuroscientist who is also CEO and co-founder of GripAble, said: “After a stroke, the thing patients want most is return to normal hand movement.
“The more rehab people do, the better, but in-clinic rehab is often inaccessible and at-home rehab is painful and boring.”
“We wanted to design a single product that could collect data through wearable technology, gamify it to make it engaging and then send data to physios and clinics.”

Paul Rinne founder and CEO of GripAble speaking at the Giant Health event 2018

Speaking to an audience at the Giant Health 2018 medtech conference in London yesterday (23 November), he explained that rehabilitation and therapy tech is “behind the times”, using foam, cones and inanimate objects to help regain use of their hand, with their activity measured with a dynamometer – a device used to measure torque and force.

What is GripAble?

Dr Rinne’s solution was to “combine the therapy tech and measuring device into one object, and then gamify it”.
A lightweight wireless device, which Dr Rinne compared to a Nintendo Wii remote, is placed in the user’s hand.
This connects to a tablet or app that displays a simple game or task, such as copying movements on a screen.
The action in the game is controlled by the user either squeezing their hand or moving their arm.

Pictures and video at the link.