Movement facilitation following incomplete spinal cord injury

In the February edition of the Journal Neurorehabilitation and Neural Repair http://bit.ly/eFxELQ Dr. Popovic and his group from the Toronto Rehabilitation Institute report that functional electrical stimulation (FES) therapy on a group of subacute incomplete tetraplegia patients worked better than conventional occupational therapy alone to increase patients’ ability to pick up and hold objects.
Based on their findings, the study’s authors recommend that stimulation therapy should be part of the therapeutic process for people with incomplete spinal cord injuries whose hand function is impaired.
Numerous neurological and orthopedic disease or injuries such as a stroke damage significantly the patient movement ability. The major movement drawbacks that lead to loss of movement ability are the difficulty to produce initial movement and disturbance of tactile sensation in the affected area of the body. Popular therapeutic tools such as Neuromuscular Electrical Stimulation (NMES), Electromyography (EMG) and Transcutaneous Electrical Nerve Stimulation (TENS) are well known and proven approaches to facilitate movement in the physical rehabilitation field. Once movement has been facilitated the physical and occupational therapist has to work on improving the patients active movement ability by means of intensive active exercise practice. The HandTutor, ArmTutor and LegTutor systems allow the therapist to customize the task practice to the patients movement ability. At the same time quantitative assessment and objective follow up provided by the HandTutor system ensure better functional movement ability outcome.