Deans' stroke musings: Effects of a Soft Robotic Hand for Hand Rehabilitation in Chronic Stroke Survivors

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.

Sunday, May 2, 2021

Effects of a Soft Robotic Hand for Hand Rehabilitation in Chronic Stroke Survivors

You will have long been discharged from rehab due to your plateauing so you'll have to figure out how to get this yourself. Spasticity would prevent me from getting anything useful out of this.

Kai YuTongPhD^⁎

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jstrokecerebrovasdis.2021.105812 Get rights and content

Abstract

Objectives

Soft robotic hands are proposed for stroke rehabilitation in terms of their high compliance and low inherent stiffness. We investigated the clinical efficacy of a soft robotic hand that could actively flex and extend the fingers in chronic stroke subjects with different levels of spasticity.

Methods

Sixteen chronic stroke subjects were recruited into this single-group study. Subjects underwent 20 sessions of 1-hour EMG-driven soft robotic hand training. Training effect was evaluated by the pre-training and post-training assessments with the clinical scores: Action Research Arm Test(ARAT), Fugl-Meyer Assessment for Upper Extremity(FMA-UE), Box-and-Block test(BBT), Modified Ashworth Scale(MAS), and maximum voluntary grip strength.

Results

For all the recruited subjects (n = 16), significant improvement of upper limb function was generally observed in ARAT (increased mean=2.44, P = 0.032), FMA-UE (increased mean=3.31, P = 0.003), BBT (increased mean=1.81, P = 0.024), and maximum voluntary grip strength (increased mean=2.14 kg, P < 0.001). No significant change was observed in terms of spasticity with the MAS (decreased mean=0.11, P = 0.423). Further analysis showed subjects with mild or no finger flexor spasticity (MAS<2, n = 9) at pre-training had significant improvement of upper limb function after 20 sessions of training. However, for subjects with moderate and severe finger flexor spasticity (MAS=2,3, n = 7) at pre-training, no significant change in clinical scores was shown and only maximum voluntary grip strength had significant increase.

Conclusion

EMG-driven rehabilitation training using the soft robotic hand with flexion and extension could be effective for the functional recovery of upper limb in chronic stroke subjects with mild or no spasticity.