Browsing by Author "Chauhan, Arvind"

Stroke is a leading cause of adult death and disability, often followed by muscle weakness, loss of control and coordination in limbs and movement disorders. Rehabilitation is critically important to restore function in damaged body parts and help the stroke-surviving individuals regain ability to independently perform everyday activities. Continuing post-stroke rehabilitative therapy at the hospital is difficult due to economic pressure and limited resources of the health care system. Also, taking help of an always-present therapist is too expensive for many patients. A relatively new approach towards stroke rehabilitation is developing technology-assisted rehabilitative system. In this study we developed a Virtual Reality based system to enhance the endurance and coordination skill of stroke patients with forearm movement disorder. This system can be used by the patient at home as per his convenience, with minimal dependency on a physiotherapist or a caregiver. Our paper describes the system design of this proof-of-concept application. The preliminary results of testing and feasibility studies suggest that the endurance and coordination skill of the participants (two able-bodied and one stroke-surviving person) improved with repeated attempts. This indicates that our system is a definite step towards becoming a simple, technology-assisted solution for rehabilitation of upper-limb movement disorder. © 2013 IEEE.

A large number of stroke-surviving individuals exhibit deficits related to upper limb movement, thereby making post stroke rehabilitation a critical part of patients' health care system. The patients are typically treated with conventional occupational therapy at the hospital after stroke. However, due to economic pressures and limited health care resources often the patients receive less therapy than required causing them to be deprived of the potential therapeutic benefits. Thus implementing a cost-effective home based technology-assisted rehabilitation system which is capable of providing intensive, adaptive and individualized rehabilitation service is critical. Virtual reality (VR) based rehabilitation system seems to address this challenge effectively. VR technology for rehabilitation allows us to create an interactive environment with precise control over intensity of practice that influence one's motor control in an individualized manner. In this study we developed an interactive VR-based platform which challenges the coordination skill of individuals with upper limb impairment. Additionally, we used patient's physiological indices to understand their stress level while they interact with the VR-based rehabilitation environment. The system developed in this work is a first step to understand its potential to provide individualized home-based rehabilitative service with minimal dependency on physiotherapist. In our initial study designed as a proof-of-concept application, one stroke-surviving patient participated in the interactive VR-based task. The preliminary results obtained from this initial study indicate the potential of mapping one's stress level to his physiological indices. Thus these results indicate the potential applicability of such a system for various stroke-rehabilitation applications