Rafael Valbuena Urdaneta, Jacob Rinda, Megan Dierking, Alec Arvia, and Christopher Moss
Stroke victims often require physical therapy to develop wrist strength and dexterity.
However, therapy can be prohibitively expensive for some patients. The Flexible Wrist
Exoskeleton (FWE) is a rehabilitation device intended to reduce rehabilitation cost by
aiding the patient and therapist in a rehabilitation session. The device performs a
traditional physical therapist’s task of providing continuously variable and customizable
force on the wearer’s wrist during flexion/extension and radial/ulnar deviation.
Continuously variable force levels are achieved by stretching elastic elements attached
to a glove with linear actuators mounted on an arm brace. The device creates wrist
loads between approximately one and 15 pounds.
The device records wrist angles and delivered load in two degrees of freedom and
saves data to a Secure Digital (SD) card for review. This data facilitates accelerated
patient progression by providing physical therapists rapid access to quantitative
measurements of patient progress. The FWE also includes an integrated
audio-feedback user interface (UI) that provides information about force levels and
serves as a guide through a therapy session. The audio UI increases the device’s
accessibility and will ease operation for patients and therapists. The current UI includes
basic operational feedback in English only, but significant growth potential exists for
expanded feedback and additional languages.
The FWE can improve the efficiency of therapy sessions and provide quantitative data
for therapists to improve rehabilitation programming. This will reduce patient time in
therapy and could reduce the number of sessions required for recovery, driving down
therapy costs and improving accessibility to therapy services.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8c3XrxfuJM&feature=youtu.be