Delivering Remote Rehabilitation at Home: An Integrated Physio-Neuro Approach to Effective and User Friendly Wearable Devices

There is a global shortage of manpower and technology in rehabilitation to attend to the five million new patients who are left disabled every year with stroke. Neuroplasticity is increasingly recognized to be a primary mechanism to achieve significant motor recovery. However, most rehabilitation devices either limit themselves to mechanical repetitive movement practice at a limb level or focus only on cognitive tasks. This may result in improvements in impairment but seldom translates into effective limb and hand use in daily activities. This paper presents an easy-to-use, wearable upper limb system, SynPhNe (pronounced like “symphony”), which trains brain and muscle as one system employing neuroplasticity principles. A summary of clinical results with stroke patients is presented. A new, wireless, home-use version of the solution architecture has been proposed, which can make it possible for patients to do guided therapy at home and thus have access to more therapy hours.