Can Robotics Help People Walk Again
Robotic technologies in the field of neuro-rehabilitation are increasingly associated with improved patient outcomes. While the engineering certainly aids the patient in learning how to walk again, perhaps a significant contribution to the process has gone unrecognized. The technology as well has the potential to augment the work of the physical therapist in means that might otherwise exist impractical at best and impossible at worst. A recent example is the surge in adoption of robotic exoskeletons used to rehabilitate patients following a stroke, spinal cord or traumatic brain injury.
Rehabilitation after a stroke or spinal cord injury (SCI) tin can be grueling and expensive. According to the Canadian Heart and Stroke Foundation, stroke patients spend more 639,000 days in acute care and 4.five one thousand thousand days in residential care facilities, totaling $3.vi billion on an annual basis. Spinal String Injury Canada reports there are more than 86,000 people living with SCI in Canada—with an estimated 4,300 new cases each year, also resulting in an almanac cost tag of $three.6 billion. Worst of all, the gap betwixt the promise and reality of rehabilitation for patients often times can't exist bridged. But that may soon change with new robotic tools to augments health care providers' rehabilitative arsenal.
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The International Collaboration On Repair Discoveries (ICORD) will soon exist ushering in a new affiliate in neuro-rehabilitation research with their recent acquisition of the Ekso™ robotic exoskeleton. ICORD is an interdisciplinary inquiry eye at the Academy of British Columbia and the Vancouver Littoral Health Research Constitute focused on SCI and looking for more effective means of functional recovery and improved quality of life afterwards SCI. There volition soon be a new confront of rehabilitation with robotic exoskeletal suits helping humans (patients and therapists akin) exercise the work to walk again.
Ekso, a habiliment robot designed by the Richmond, California-based company Ekso Bionics™, enables individuals with lower extremity paralysis or weakness to stand upwardly and walk over basis with a natural, full weight-bearing, reciprocal gait. Walking is accomplished by the user'southward weight shifts to activate sensors in the device which in plow initiate steps. Battery-powered motors drive the legs, replacing as much – or as little – of the patient'due south deficient neuromuscular function as is required to achieve airing.
"Ekso is an exciting applied science for us considering it provides us with a strategy to investigate the overall wellness benefits of getting patients with complete SCI upwards and walking again, including the possibility of relieving the many associated secondary complications of SCI," commented Tania Lam, PhD, Master Investigator at ICORD and an Associate Professor in the School of Kinesiology at the University of British Columbia. "The improver of the Variable Help feature also opens upwardly whole new inquiry opportunities for investigating new gait training strategies for incomplete SCI patients. It helps to relieve some of the physical burden of doing over-basis gait grooming for patients while enhancing the concrete therapist's ability to conduct the rehab session. The therapist can focus on the quality of the stepping pattern without having to worry about maintaining the patient's correct posture or supporting them. Everyone can focus on the actual act of walking."
Every bit a principal investigator at ICORD, Dr. Lam is continuously looking for ways to improve gait training. "We are very interested in pursuing research comparison over-ground gait training with the Ekso to electric current gait grooming strategies, such as body-weight supported treadmill training. Over-ground walking requires you to propel the body forward, not just stay in 1 identify, which is what you lot get with a treadmill. The Ekso brings us closer to existent-life walking contexts of going from Point A to Signal B, supporting the foundation of actual walking, which requires integration with rest and postural control."
Dr. Lam added, "We're at the showtime stages but nosotros're very excited most the possibilities this new platform could provide. We likewise look forward to connected advances in the engineering which could permit people to practice more than skilled walking tasks, like walking upward stairs or stepping over objects, that more than closely align with real-globe situations people see."
Ekso'south innovative, task-based platform is designed as a practical and efficient means for concrete therapists to assistance patients produce proper bio-mechanical alignments while re-learning proper gait patterns and weight shifts, and to achieve higher step dosage than what might be possible with traditional over basis gait grooming methods. This ways therapists who may otherwise take opted to "laissez passer" on gait training with the almost acute patients to focus on smaller, more than achievable rehabilitation goals at present have a practical option to get them upward and walking over footing under as much of their own power as possible. For patients further along in their recovery, information technology allows therapists to provide a more personalized and progressive intendance plan.
Aside from the clinical benefits, the latest version of Ekso likewise hosts practical benefits to clinics, making it easy to integrate into their practise and provide rehabilitation to a wide variety of patients in a single day. The device takes up no more than floor space than a patient sitting in a chair and the detachable batteries tin be charged from a standard wall outlet. While the technology accommodates a vast spectrum of patient sizes and clinical presentations, adjustments between patients can be washed in less than 5 minutes.
The type of rehab a patient receives can have dramatic impacts on the fourth dimension to recovery and the percent of recovery. Typically, physical therapists have the resources to utilize gait-training techniques, such as parallel confined or KAFOs, but these can be impractical for the patient equally well as the staff. Conversely, trunk weight-supported treadmills tin exist complicated to install and gear up, take upwardly considerably more floor space, and don't necessarily require patients to appoint in the therapy, therefore slowing the rehabilitation trajectory.
All that'southward required is a robotic suit, no larger than an bodily person, instead of a team of trained specialists, expensive infrastructures built to house past robotic rehab systems, and special electrical requirements. The patient merely straps the robotic suit over his clothing and begins to walk. This enables individuals with lower body weakness to achieve mobility, strength, or endurance not otherwise possible. "Ekso is filling a gap in the rehabilitation continuum, and so nosotros're looking forward to uncovering how this can be used most effectively in the care plan. The possibilities are exciting," Dr. Lam stated.
"Companies accept been building robots as a solution for paralysis for well over a decade," says Ekso Bionics CEO Nathan Harding. "The one affair we've come up to realize is that the difference betwixt a cool prototype and a viable production is huge. No one needs technology for the sake of applied science."
With the Ekso bionic adapt, the company has developed a meaningful therapeutic robot that is both sophisticated and user-friendly. Added Harding, "It'due south designed to work within the constraints of a real healthcare setting, and we feel information technology marks the beginning of a new chapter for both patients and practitioners. The goal was to design something that could help therapists get their patients walking on day one and yet assistance them progress along a rehabilitation plan. Information technology was important too that it was easy and efficient for therapists to use with a wide diversity of patients."
While ICORD is the first facility in western Canada with an Ekso, there are more than than xl systems placed in Northward America, Europe and South Africa. ICORD will initially use the bionic suit to conduct research studies in people with SCI. The wearable robot uses forcefulness and motility sensors to monitor the patient's gestures and motility, and uses this information to intelligently interpret the intent and strength of the patient and translate it into appropriate activity. It allows patients to walk in a directly line, stand up from a sitting position, correspond an extended period of time, or sit downwardly from a continuing position. These seemingly simple acts might too be applied to a much broader patient population unlocking an entirely new approach to patient care, which could dramatically reduce healthcare costs and enhance lives.
In addition to helping those with some level of paralysis, the Ekso bionic adapt could likewise provide benefits by getting patients who've been hospitalized up and out of bed sooner. Early airing may be direct tied to reduction in risk of deep vein thrombosis and fifty-fifty hospital-caused pneumonia. In essence, this rehabilitative tool could get patients home faster and keep them healthier. That apparently translates to reduced healthcare costs.
The reality of leveraging therapeutic robotics to help deliver an affordable and constructive healthcare system has never been closer. "To go people safely up and mobile could reduce secondary medical complications during the acute care phase but also over the lifetime of the patient," Dr. Lam pointed out. "Many of the secondary complications that arise over the long term come from patients sitting all the fourth dimension." With the rise of obesity, an aging population and chronic health conditions, mobility aided by robotic exoskeletons could be a defining driver of mental, concrete and even fiscal wellness.
Source: https://hospitalnews.com/reality-robots-helping-patients-walk/
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