TY - JOUR
T1 - Robotic care
T2 - 22nd International Conference on Engineering Design 2019
AU - Prieto, Pablo
AU - Auat, Fernando
AU - Escobar, Maria
AU - Vallejos, Ronny
AU - Maldonado, Paula
AU - Larrain, Cristobal
AU - Serey, Martin
N1 - Funding Information:
The authors would like to thank Universidad Tcnié ca Federico Santa María (UTFSM), the UTFSM research grant 216.30.1 and the Basal Project 0008 for funding this project. Additionally, we would like to give special thanks to the Hospital de Peñablanca for allowing us to interview/observe patients and use their installations to carry out meetings with the medical staff.
Funding Information:
The combination of two therapies (mirror and passive exercise) in a low cost robotic system has not been implemented in the field of finger-hand rehabilitation. Theoretically, this new type of combined therapy seems to work very well, according to the feedback received from rehabilitation specialists. However, it still needs design refinements and, more important, it needs to be validated with real patients at a public hospital. If statistical data, collected from these validation tests, show that there are significant improvements in the patient recovery then this proposal will be the starting point for the future design of robotic rehabilitation systems that integrate at least 2 therapies simultaneously. This work was born in the Autumn Term of 2015, in the context of an undergraduate course in Product Development. In 2017 a student that was part of the original team, continued with the development of this product as part of his final year project. To do so, he worked with an interdisciplinary group having financial support from the University. Later, in 2018, the student got a seed fund to continue working on this robotic system and, because of this work, he was recognised as one of the 100 young influencers in Chile. Additionally, in the same year, the student got the first place in “Falling Walls Labs Chile”, an event on breakthroughs in science and society. In November 2018, he presented this project in Falling Walls Germany. Currently, early 2019, the student funded a small start-up company to continue the development process of the presented project.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2019 Design Society. All rights reserved.
PY - 2019/7
Y1 - 2019/7
N2 - A low cost robotic-assisted prototype for finger and hand rehabilitation of people affected by a stroke is presented. The system was developed by a team of undergraduate students led by a Design lecturer in collaboration with the Rehabilitation Unit of the Peñablanca Public Hospital in Chile. The system consists of a flexion sensor equipped glove, a hand exoskeleton and an Arduino control unit. The patient wears the glove in his healthy hand. When s/he performs movements with the healthy hand, the sensors register the flexion of the fingers and send this information to the servo motors installed in an exoskeleton attached to the affected hand. In this way, the affected hand reproduces the movement of the healthy hand. The system uses a combination of the mirror therapy (the patient sees his/her affected hand moving in the same way that the healthy hand does) and passive exercising (as the exoskeleton produces the movement of the hand affected by the stroke). The combination of two types of therapy in a single low cost system makes the present work unique. In the near future, the developed prototype will be used to validate the effectiveness of the new proposed robotic therapy.
AB - A low cost robotic-assisted prototype for finger and hand rehabilitation of people affected by a stroke is presented. The system was developed by a team of undergraduate students led by a Design lecturer in collaboration with the Rehabilitation Unit of the Peñablanca Public Hospital in Chile. The system consists of a flexion sensor equipped glove, a hand exoskeleton and an Arduino control unit. The patient wears the glove in his healthy hand. When s/he performs movements with the healthy hand, the sensors register the flexion of the fingers and send this information to the servo motors installed in an exoskeleton attached to the affected hand. In this way, the affected hand reproduces the movement of the healthy hand. The system uses a combination of the mirror therapy (the patient sees his/her affected hand moving in the same way that the healthy hand does) and passive exercising (as the exoskeleton produces the movement of the hand affected by the stroke). The combination of two types of therapy in a single low cost system makes the present work unique. In the near future, the developed prototype will be used to validate the effectiveness of the new proposed robotic therapy.
KW - Biomedical design
KW - Design for health
KW - Open source design
KW - Social responsibility
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85079815406&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1017/dsi.2019.103
DO - 10.1017/dsi.2019.103
M3 - Conference article
AN - SCOPUS:85079815406
SN - 2220-4342
VL - 1
SP - 975
EP - 984
JO - Proceedings of the Design Society: International Conference on Engineering Design
JF - Proceedings of the Design Society: International Conference on Engineering Design
IS - 1
Y2 - 5 August 2019 through 8 August 2019
ER -