Abstract
Upper-limb impairments are all-pervasive in Activities of Daily Living (ADLs). As a consequence, people affected by a loss of arm function must endure severe limitations. To compensate for the lack of a functional arm and hand, we developed a wearable system that combines different assistive technologies including sensing, haptics, orthotics and robotics. The result is a device that helps lifting the forearm by means of a passive exoskeleton and improves the grasping ability of the impaired hand by employing a wearable robotic supernumerary finger. A pilot study involving 3 patients, which was conducted to test the capability of the device to assist in performing ADLs, confirmed its usefulness and serves as a first step in the investigation of novel paradigms for robotic assistance.
Highlights
Stroke is a main source of long-term impairments of the upper limb (Go et al, 2014)
In the SoftPro project, we have studied the combination of the Sixth Finger with a passive and lightweight elbow exoskeleton called Assistive Elbow Orthosis, an instrumented cap which is a human-robot interface called the e-Cap, and a force feedback device called the CUFF
The advantage of the proposed system compared with the constraint-induced movement therapy—a rehabilitative approach characterized by the restrain of the healthy upper limb accompanied by the shaping and repetitive task-oriented training of more affected upper extremity, with the purposes of overcoming the learned nonuse phenomenon of the hemiplegic upper extremity (Taub et al, 1993)—is that there is no need to immobilize or restrain the healthy limb to encourage the use of the paretic hand
Summary
Stroke is a main source of long-term impairments of the upper limb (Go et al, 2014). For affected people, the restoration of hand and arm function is important to execute Activities of Daily Living (ADLs). Robotic aids represent promising tools for the recovery of a post-stroke paretic upper limb. The use of robotic devices in rehabilitation and assistance can enable intense, engaging and targeted treatment of the debilitated arm, and can serve as a reliable method for observing patient advancement (Chiri et al, 2012). In Heo et al (2012), the authors presented a broad survey on hand exoskeleton innovations for rehabilitation and assistance. Most of these devices have low wearability, and are intended to restore functional motions during the first months after stroke, when typically plastic changes of the central nervous system occur. Any assistive devices are intended to effectively restore hand functions for patients in a chronic state
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