Tutors Compliment New Design for Physiotherapy

News@Northeastern Home News Archives on October 14, 2011 featured an article about Prof. Constantinos Mavroidis and doctoral candidate Richard Ranky from Northeastern University who are developing new sensors for customizable devices designed to help doctors measure progress of physical therapy patients. For example the Tutor system which is improving functional outcomes in physical rehabilitation for patients suffering from MS, CP, Brain or Spinal cord injury, stroke, Parkinson’s disease and many kind of limb surgeries.
“Our work will bring this important field of medical rehabilitation further into the information technology world of tomorrow,” said Constantinos Mavroidis, the principal investigator and a professor in Northeastern’s Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering.
Through a National Science Foundation grant, Mavroidis and doctoral candidate Richard Ranky will design tiny sensors to be embedded into medical devices that are customized to an individual’s need — for example, a handle or computer hardware for medical monitoring and therapy of a person’s hand or the Tutors.
Under a separate grant from the Center for Integration of Medicine and Innovative Technology (CIMIT) they will apply this technology to designing a customizable orthosis brace with embedded sensors to fit around the Achilles tendon and stabilize the ankle and foot, so patients who have just suffered a stroke can more safely walk and move around.
This novel approach to both the design of the sensors and their simultaneous installation into medical devices could help streamline the creation of such devices in the medical field, the researchers say.
By combining this new technology with its medical application, Mavroidis says doctors could measure the strength of a stroke patient’s grasp or the distribution of pressure around their lower extremities when walking. This information could be crucial to determining a patient’s progress during rehabilitation exercises or even help predict when a device needs replacing based on wear and tear.
Similarly the Tutors allow for the customization of the treatment sessions. The newly developed HandTutor and its sister devices (ArmTutor, LegTutor, 3DTutor) have become a key system in neuromuscular rehabilitation and physical therapy. These innovative devices implement an impairment based program with augmented feedback and encourage motor learning through intensive active exercises. These exercises are challenging and motivating and allow for repetitive training tailored to the patient’s performance and for interactive rehabilitation exercises. The system also includes objective quantitative evaluations that provide the therapist information to customize the most suitable rehabilitation program to the patient’s ability.
The data would be collected electronically and wirelessly, so that doctors could monitor patients in person, or even receive the data transmitted from a patient in their home.
“Now that you can actually put a sensor inside a device and customize it for the user, this opens up a lot of new possibilities for personalized rehabilitation devices,” Ranky said.
The Tutors are fully certified by the FDA and CE and are available for children as well as adults.