Oct 29, 2010 13:00 GMT  ·  By

A five-year, $1.5 million grant from the National Institutes of Health will be used by UC Irvine biomedical, mechanical & aerospace engineering professor David Reinkensmeyer, to test the effectiveness of robot-assisted recovery in stroke patients.

Strokes affect more and more people every year, in Orange County alone, there are nearly 8,000 people who experience them.

So a team of researchers from UCI will test the use of technology in restoring manual dexterity to stroke patients, as most of them have trouble using a hand or arm.

Reinkensmeyer said that “we know that exercise after stroke helps rebuild brain pathways, a concept known as use-dependent brain plasticity.

“What we don’t know is whether exercise is more beneficial if it’s aided by robots that guide patients’ hands and help them complete specific tasks.”

Professor Reinkensmeyer is working with UCI neurologist Steven Cramer, assistant professor of electrical and biomedical engineering Mark Bachman, and former doctoral student Eric Wolbrecht, now an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Idaho.

In the case of a stroke patient, traditional recovery procedures must be made by physical or occupational therapists, so the researchers are making an effort to automate some of these processes, so that everybody can benefit from them.

“People prefer exercising with a robot that helps them with computer games, so there’s a motivational aspect to robotics, but it’s not clear yet whether robot-assisted exercise is more effective than exercising without it,” said Reinkensmeyer.

To answer this question, the team will work with several local hospitals, starting with UC Irvine Medical Center, and they will begin to study patients in the first days after stroke.

The severity of the stroke is a determining factor in the recovery process, so every study participant will undergo pre-study brain scans to determine the degree of damage to neurons and insulating material, which carry instructions from the brain to the muscles.

The researchers will work in the iMove Center at the California Institute for Telecommunications & Information Technology, where they will build a wearable sensor that will measure people’s hand movements after stroke but before the beginning of the therapy.

It will probably look like a wristwatch, which will allow doctors to see the improvements in patients' limb movements.

Besides the wristwatch-type device, the researchers will also build a compact, robotic device that will assist patients at home as they exercise the impaired hand.

The robot will be coupled with software and it will provide games that will encourage patients to exercise their arm and move their fingers.

Building robots to help people recover faster is interesting but the researchers need to know whether this solution gives positive results so they will also carry out a test: after the formal physical therapy, stroke patients taking part in the study will be divided randomly into two groups.

Everyone will receive a hand robot, which will be programmed to help one group more than the other, and at the end, therapists will measure the results.

Depending on these results, the robot's control algorithms will be adjusted for optimum movement training.

“I think we’ll find out which particular set of robot parameters helps stroke patients recover faster and better,” added Reinkensmeyer.