The incidence of stroke in India ranges between 105 and 152/100,000 people per year. Up to 80% of stroke survivors have upper limb impairment early after a stroke. Most acute in-clinic rehabilitation prioritizes balance and mobility over hand functions. Home-based rehabilitation programs are prescribed to increase the UL therapy dosage for patients to aid recovery. The conventional approach to home-based hand therapy, based on performing a printed handout of exercises, can be tedious and mundane, thus leading to poor adherence and high dropouts. Rehabilitation robots can address some of these problems by providing intense, engaging, semi-automated therapy with a therapist's intermittent, direct/remote supervision. However, there is a paucity of evidence for the independent use of rehabilitation robots at home, and no studies in India.
This talk will present the preliminary evidence about the long-term usability and feasibility of home-based robot-assisted hand rehabilitation with PLUTO. PLUTO is a single-degree-of-freedom robot for training wrist flexion-extension, wrist ulnar-radial deviation, forearm pronation-supination, hand opening-closing, and functional grasps.
In this study, eight stroke survivors, with the help of their caregivers, were asked to train with PLUTO independently for four weeks. All eight subjects completed four weeks of training and trained for 79±23.78 minutes daily, 6.17±0.79 days per week. PLUTO was rated as having excellent usability, and all subjects had significantly reduced upper limb impairments in both body function and activity scales. Notably, all subjects reported that the activities of daily living they were already performing had become more manageable and could do new daily living activities with their affected hand (e.g., washing hair, holding a mobile, using a knife).