Non-motorised Rehabilitation Device for Performance Assessment in Upper Limb Stroke Rehabilitation: A Pilot Study

For your therapist to read and implement these 9 pages.

 Non-motorised Rehabilitation Device for Performance Assessment in Upper Limb Stroke Rehabilitation: A Pilot Study

Sulaiman Mazlan1 , Hisyam Abdul Rahman1*, Babul Salam Ksm Kader Ibrahim2 , Muhamad Saiful Huq3 , Yeong Che Fai4 1Advanced Mechatronics Research Group (ADMIRE), Universiti Tun Hussein Onn Malaysia, Batu Pahat, 86400, MALAYSIA 2Faculty of Engineering, Environment and Computing, Coventry University, Coventry, CV1 5FB, UNITED KINGDOM 3Department of Mechatronic Engineering, Faculty of Engineering and Design, Institute of Technology Sligo, F91 YW50, IRELAND 4Center of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, Skudai, 81310, MALAYSIA *Corresponding Author DOI: https://doi.org/10.30880/ijie.2022.14.04.024 Received 03 June 2021; Accepted 12 September 2021; Available online 20 June 2022 

Abstract: 

Stroke patients with upper limb disability restricted to carry out their activities of daily living. The patient needs a motivation to recover from a stroke(If you had 100% recovery protocols that would be motivation enough, but you have useless guidelines!) and the patient also needs to go through a rehabilitation process at the same time. The conventional rehabilitation process scoring systems are always subjective, lack reliability and relies heavily on the ability of the trained physiotherapist that providing only rough estimates on motor function. On the other hand, robot-based assessments are objective, repeatable, and could potentially reduce the assessment time. Therefore, a simple non-motorized device was developed as a tool to objectively assess hand function of stroke patients. This study was carried out to investigate the suitability of using the developed device with stroke patient populations and to evaluate the performance of clinical scores prediction of the stroke patients. A total of five patients with upper limb disability following stroke consented to take part in this study. Twelve predictive variables were investigated, relating to the total movement time, velocity, strategy, accuracy, and smoothness from three robotic assessment modules which are Draw I, Draw Diamond and Draw Circle. The hardware for measuring elbow angle has been developed to measure the shoulder movement performed by patient during the assessment process. In addition to that, the shoulder movement calculation method has been proposed and validated. The findings indicate that the performance of prediction for all assessment modules has been increased after implementing the shoulder movement calculation. It is recommended this calculation method to be used in conjunction with kinematic variables to carry out the data acquisition process in the future for improvement of effectiveness and accuracy of the robotic assessment. Keywords: Rehabilitation, assessment, stroke, upper limb, robotic