This project is focused on a major enhancement of gait retraining in stroke patients and improvement of orthotic intervention in the clinical settings. Researchers have developed a wearable and portable smart training orthosis that could be used by patients throughout daily activities, with constant reinforcement of the targeted gait pattern. The trainer targets both the primary and secondary gait deviations. This constant reinforcement of gait retraining in a real-world environment has the potential to provide more effective and faster gait retraining, improving one's ability to ambulate.
The proposed project will investigate the feasibility of providing to hospitals and clinics advanced technology, in order to better facilitate stroke patients' recovery of motor function for better quality of life. A major portion of the project will focus on the understanding of the relevant issues in healthcare with respect to neuro-rehabilitation. As a result of this project, researchers hope to develop a sustainable model for providing the healthcare providers with advanced robotic devices for rehabilitation of patients post-stroke. This in turn could have a broader impact on the quality of life of thousands of stroke victims.
In the US alone there are 800,000 new cases of stroke every year, and 80% of patients post-stroke require rehabilitation to regain motor function. In the last 15 years, several robotic systems for neuro-rehabilitation have emerged, but these systems are not specialized for gait retraining of stroke patients, thus producing limited functional gains in patients, at an excessive cost. As a result, currently there are over 1 million stroke survivors living in the U.S., who have undergone standard gait rehabilitation, and yet have balance and gait impairments. We believe that we have the technology and the business model, which can alleviate this widespread problem, and enable institutions to administer effective and economical gait rehabilitation. The intellectual merit of this project is the major enhancement of gait retraining in stroke patientsn the clinical settings. The major take-away from our I-CORPS experience is that what clinicians are missing is a simple and easy to use tool which can assist them in advancing the legs of the patient during gait training over the treadmill and over the ground. This tool needs to apply guidance forces and torques to the leg(s) while not impeding all of the natural gait kinematics, and this is what we propose to develop. Based on our findings, we executed a pivot, and came up with a new concept for a device which is an accessory to the commonly used body weight support (BWS) systems. This approach has at least two major advantages over the previous one: our product can now be smaller and more affordable, because it does not include a frame structure, and our product improves the economics of the use of the equipment which is already widely used at institutions,
