Deans' stroke musings: A Synergistic Rehabilitation Approach for Post-Stroke Patients with a Hand Exoskeleton: A Feasibility Study with Healthy Subjects

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.

Saturday, January 17, 2026

A Synergistic Rehabilitation Approach for Post-Stroke Patients with a Hand Exoskeleton: A Feasibility Study with Healthy Subjects

WOW! You got published by faking stroke research on healthy subjects? You should all be fired for cause!

A Synergistic Rehabilitation Approach for Post-Stroke Patients with a Hand Exoskeleton: A Feasibility Study with Healthy Subjects

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Institute of Mechanical Intelligence, Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, 56127 Pisa, Italy

Department of Engineering and Science, Universitas Mercatorum, 00186 Rome, Italy

Author to whom correspondence should be addressed.

Robotics2026, 15(1), 21;https://doi.org/10.3390/robotics15010021

This article belongs to the Special Issue AI for Robotic Exoskeletons and Prostheses

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Abstract

Hand exoskeletons are increasingly used to support post-stroke reach-to-grasp, yet most intention-detection strategies trigger assistance from local hand events without considering the synergy between proximal arm transport and distal hand shaping. We evaluated whether proximal arm kinematics, alone or fused with EMG, can predict flexor and extensor digitorum activity for synergy-aligned hand assistance. We trained nine models per participant: linear regression (LINEAR), feedforward neural network (NONLINEAR), and LSTM, each under EMG-only, kinematics-only (KIN), and EMG+KIN inputs. Performance was assessed by RMSE on test trials and by a synergy-retention analysis, comparing synergy weights from original EMG versus a hybrid EMG in which extensor and flexor digitorum measure signals were replaced by model predictions. Results have shown that kinematic information can predict muscle activity even with a simple linear model (average RMSE around 30% of signal amplitude peak during go-to-grasp contractions), and synergy analysis indicated high cosine similarity between original and hybrid synergy weights (on average 0.87 for the LINEAR model). Furthermore, the LINEAR model with kinematics input has been tested in a real-time go-to-grasp motion, developing a high-level control strategy for a hand exoskeleton, to better simulate post-stroke rehabilitation scenarios. These results suggest the intrinsic synergistic motion of go-to-grasp actions, offering a practical path, in hand rehabilitation contexts, for timing hand assistance in synergy with arm transport and with minimal setup burden.