Serious Games for Post-Stroke Rehabilitation Using Microsoft Kinect

Well shit, there have been 30 posts on Kinect back to June 2012 and you still have NO protocol?  How long do stroke survivors have to settle for the vast incompetency in stroke? I propose we start a new stroke foundation; millionaires and billionaires contact me and we'll get a 501(c)3 going. You'll need it for your children and grandchildren. You could proudly point to solving stroke as one of your accomplishments.

• Kinect (30 posts)

 

Serious Games for Post-Stroke Rehabilitation Using Microsoft Kinect

Kinect

Azrulhizam Shapi’i, Haslina Arshad, Mohd Syazwan Baharuddin, Hafiz Mohd Sarim

Abstract

Traditional rehabilitation is a tedious task which typically reduces the patient’s motivation to perform rehabilitation exercises. Patients therefore need a program that can entice them to do rehabilitation exercises continuously. The proposed game includes two different types of game and three different types of movement for interacting with the game. The game was designed and developed based on the elements of a rehabilitation game and the types of movement in rehabilitation exercises. The interface was developed with the aim of increasing the motivation of players, and the design was based on an analysis of the technology constraints faced by post-stroke patients. Since these patients experience physical limitations, Microsoft Kinect was used for interaction in this game. Using Kinect, the patient is not bound by the controller to interact with the game.  Therefore, rehabilitation exercise games that support multi-player will provide a higher motivation than the single-player. Since most stroke patients suffer from cognitive impairment, cognitive challenge levels are also the key factors in the design of the game so that it does not become an obstacle for the recovery process.  This research develops a prototype of a rehabilitation exercise game that contains aspects of the social context, the type of movement and cognitive challenges. It also provides usability in game design, according to a post-stroke stage so that they can perform recovery activities based on their ability. In addition, this study highlights technology and rehabilitation exercise games in Malaysia.The game also adds a social context that gives patients the opportunity to have a friend to play either by competition or cooperation. The contribution of this research is to measure the effectiveness of Microsoft's Kinect game console and this game can help in recovery the post-stroke patients do additional exercises at home without the supervision of therapist. (But what the fuck are the results from using the Kinect protocol?)

Keywords

Post-stroke game, Exercise game, Kinect, Rehabilitation game, Natural user interface.

Full Text:

PDF

References

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Shaughnessy, Resnick, & Macko. (2006). Testing a model of post-stroke exercise behaviour. Rehabilitation Nursing, 31(1), 15–21.
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DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.18517/ijaseit.8.4-2.6823

4 Things You Need to Know When Pursuing An Ambitious Dream

My dream is to completely change stroke rehab, such that it becomes a minor illness.  It is grandiose and delusional since I have no medical experience and don't even have a clue on how to set up a foundation to accomplish that. I have purchased the URL of strokeresearchinstitute.com so I'm not completely at step zero.
http://tinybuddha.com/blog/4-things-need-know-pursuing-ambitious-dream/

1. There’s no shame in being green.

2. Setbacks are part of the process.

3. It helps to hold yourself accountable.

4. An experience can be worth so much more than it costs.

Soon we'll cure diseases with a cell, not a pill

This switch in thought processes can't come too soon for stroke. But I bet not a single stroke leader will think of putting this into practice for solving all the problems in stroke. Our current stroke leadership is non-existent. We should be growing all the different types of neurons along with a blood supply to nourish them. There is the request for proposal to researchers. Send it out to find out what the cost would be to find answers and then go grant writing to get foundations to pay for that research. It's so fucking simple to accomplish stroke solutions. You describe the problem in specific terms that researchers will be able to create clinical trials on. None of this pie-in-sky research. 

Damn it all: stroke is easy; 5 steps.
1.  Describe the problems exactly. There are tens of thousands of pieces of research already hinting at solutions, just need followup.
2.  Write thousands of RFPs to researchers/MIT grads to solve those problems.
3.  Fund them with foundation grants.
4.  Write stroke rehab protocols based on the research.
5.  Get the Nobel prize in medicine.  

Soon we'll cure diseases with a cell, not a pill 

Current medical treatment boils down to six words: Have disease, take pill, kill something. But physician Siddhartha Mukherjee points to a future of medicine that will transform the way we heal.

New way to repair nerves

This would be so simple to find out if this works for stroke repair. You ask researchers the cost of the research to prove this one way or the other, then you go to foundations explaining what you are trying to do. Such an innovative proposal should easily shake some money loose. I know grant writers that could do this. Does no one in the stroke medical world have any BHAGs(Big Hairy Audacious Goals)? I have dozens.

New way to repair nerves

Regenerative medicine using stem cells is an increasingly promising approach to treat many types of injury. Transplanted stem cells can differentiate into just about any other kind of cell, including neurons to potentially reconnect a severed spinal cord and repair paralysis.
A variety of agents have been shown to induce transplanted stem cells to differentiate into neurons.  Tufts Univ. biomedical engineers recently published the first report of a promising new way to induce human mesenchymal stem cells (or hMSCs, which are derived from bone marrow) to differentiate into neuron-like cells: treating them with exosomes.
Exosomes are very small, hollow particles that are secreted from many types of cells. They contain functional proteins and genetic materials and serve as a vehicle for communication between cells. In the nervous system, exosomes guide the direction of nerve growth, control nerve connection and help regenerate peripheral nerves.
In a series of experiments reported in PLOS ONE, the Tufts researchers showed that exosomes from PC12 cells (neuron-like progenitor cells derived from rats) at various stages of their own differentiation could, in turn, cause hMSCs to become neuron-like cells. Exosomes had not previously been studied as a way to induce human stem cell differentiation.
The biomedical engineers also showed that the exosomes contain miRNAs—tiny pieces of RNA that regulate cell behavior and are known to play a role in neuronal differentiation. The researchers hypothesize that the exosomes caused the hMSCs to differentiate by delivering miRNA into the stem cells. The researchers plan future studies to determine the exact mechanism.
Synthetic exosomes could avoid need for neural progenitor cells
"In combination with synthetic nanoparticles that my laboratory is developing, we may ultimately be able to use these identified miRNAs or proteins to make synthetic exosomes, thereby avoiding the need to use any kind of neural progenitor cell line to induce neuron growth," said the paper's senior and corresponding author Qiaobing Xu, assistant professor of biomedical engineering at Tufts School of Engineering.
Source: Tufts Univ.

What are you doing to change the stroke medical world?

A question I got this weekend from a good friend. I wasn't able to articulate it very successfully at the bar we were at. To give you an idea of what we are dealing with, here is the first conversation we had with each other years ago, 'I'm Dean, I'm arrogant'. 'I'm Sue, I'm obnoxious'.
At first I was somewhat offended that I'm assigned the task of fixing the f*cking broken stroke medical world rather than the neurologists and stroke hospitals that allowed such a disaster to happen.
So here goes;
1. Report on all the various problems that exist in the stroke world. If you don't even acknowledge there are problems solutions will never occur. Our stroke hospitals and stroke associations have their heads so far up their asses they never see anything wrong with the rosy stroke world they see. Their world only sees that if we could have everyone in the world trained in F.A.S.T. and delivered to a stroke hospital quickly then everything will be hunky-dory and those survivors will praise those efforts. What a load of bullshit. Everyone associated with these should be fired for incompetence.

2. Report and lay down an evidence base of existing research that just needs further validation and translation into stroke protocols. My blog is doing a good job of that. I should never have had to do this. Every hospital should have someone assigned just to update stroke protocols based on published research. That alone is why every hospital president and stroke department head should be fired.

3. Create a strategic plan that lays down a step by step process to address each of the problems in stroke.

4. Engage every survivor to scream at their doctors and hospitals as to why they haven't fixed anything from the first two points. 10 million persons a year can get very noisy.

5. Either start a survivor focused stroke association or take over an existing one.

6. Create a research foundation that  sponsors research to follow that strategic plan and solve those problems in stroke.