I-Corps: Affordable Assistive Devices for Stroke Survivor Rehabilitation

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The broader impact of this I-Corps project is in allowing survivors of physical and neurological events to regain autonomy over their rehabilitation. While the proposed work focuses on stroke survivors, there is direct translation to the assessment, assistance, and management of other conditions, as well as use in general training after injury, and in industry to improve efficiency and reduce the risk of injury. There is a potential commercial opportunity in addressing the needs of intervention providers in quantifying the efficacy of their equipment and healthcare providers in allowing for contextualization of patients. Traditional rehabilitation equipment tends to be affordable but difficult to use, resulting in low efficacy and adherence; comparatively, new rehab equipment provides greater efficacy, but is typically more expensive. With drastically lowered manufacturing costs, novel actuation and quantified sensors, and clearer outputs for patient users, this device can provide quantifiable data for evaluation through instantaneous self-motivating metrics. This approach has the potential to disrupt the standard paradigms of rehabilitation.This I-Corps project is informed by research in human-assistive, robotic, technologies. It further develops an affordable, variable-dosage exoskeleton (APEX), a wearable upper-body device to support and assist the limbs, uniquely powered by pneumatic-actuators, and adaptive to address specific user needs through feedback loops of communicative sensors and modeling. By changing the pressures in the device's actuators, APEX assists through gravitational support, passive stretching of joints, and resistance exercises. A series of device-embedded sensors and defined exercises enable the creation of patient-specific models, incorporating limb lengths, masses, ranges of motion, and strengths. By varying the protocol based on a patient's abilities, support can be provided on a spectrum by selectively changing the amount of assistance or resistance. Because APEX utilizes low-cost, low-mass, pneumatic-actuators rather than DC motors, it significantly reduces power consumption and prolongs the capacity of the device. This allows for patients to use the device in their own home, and track progress on a simplified interface - the analytics of which are sent back to their therapist, trainer, or physician.