RehabTouch: A mixed-reality gym for rehabilitating the hands, arms, trunk, and legs after stroke - Over 50% of the 700,000 individuals who survive a stroke each year have persistent movement
impairments. Intensive rehabilitation could reduce their impairments, but access to such therapy is
limited. Home therapy could supplement time with a therapist, but the current standard of care is
simply providing individuals printed sheets of exercises, an approach that is not motivating and
often not effective. Technological solutions do exist, but they are either too expensive or are only
intended to treat a small subset of the broad range of movement impairments individuals with
stroke experience, which has limited their wide spread adoption. The goal of this Phase II SBIR is
to develop and test RehabTouch, a mixed-reality gym for motivating and monitoring hand, arm,
trunk, and leg exercises after stroke. RehabTouch is an affordable rehabilitation tool consisting of
two wireless input devices called pucks that each contain an array of sensors. The pucks connect
to a software application that can direct users to perform exercises that are appropriate for their
specific impairments and then detect when repetitions of those exercises are completed. We have
shown that RehabTouch can detect the completion of 40 different exercises, and that individuals
with even severe motor impairment after stroke are able to complete hundreds of repetitions with
RehabTouch and find the system to be motivating, valuable, and easy to use. We thus hypothesize
that home therapy with RehabTouch will be feasible for individuals with a broad range of
impairments, and more motivating and effective than the current standard of practice, printed
sheets of exercises. The aims of this Phase II grant are to: 1) Implement a comprehensive library
of hand, arm, trunk, and leg exercises appropriate for individuals with mild, moderate, and severe
motor impairments by partnering with experienced PTs and OTs; 2) Develop a data-driven exercise
personalization system for RehabTouch that recommends appropriate exercises and intensity
levels for individual users; and 3) Determine the safety and effectiveness of home-based
movement training with RehabTouch for improving motor function in a randomized controlled trial
with individuals with subacute stroke (N = 50). We hypothesize that individuals who exercise with
RehabTouch will exercise for a longer duration, and have significantly greater increases in Fugl-
Meyer score and other impairment- and function-related outcomes than individuals who perform
conventional therapy. We will also analyze the data from this study to determine if RehabTouch is
appropriate for individuals with a broad range of impairments. If successful, this project will result in
a commercially-ready, clinically validated home therapy tool that could become widely adopted in
actual practice, thus reducing long term movement impairments after stroke.