After brain injury, how are individuals using their hands to accomplish daily activities?
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Individuals often lose ability to use their hands for daily activities after a stroke or brain injury. While doctors and therapists can evaluate their hand function and provide physical therapy, but we don't really know how these individuals use their hands at home. Insurance coverage often ends before therapists have a chance to complete physical therapy goals.
If we could "see" how they use their hands in their home and community, we could evaluate how effective current therapies are. We can also create more effective therapies, and study how hand use changes over time. In addition, one important determinant of improving hand function is when the individual regularly performs their assigned home exercises. If we could monitor this at home, individuals may be more likely to perform these exercises.
Solution: Low cost, unobtrusive 4-hour monitoring.
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| Measuring Hand Function |
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Portable low-cost glove for functional hand measures(National Institutes of Health Grant)
In this project, we complete development of the Shadow Monitor and test the device with healthy individuals and individuals with brain injury as they perform typical daily activities. A primary goal is to characterize these activities, and develop useful outcome variables that can be used to evaluate rehabilitation progress and assess functional abilities easily.
Project listing in the CRISP Database of federally funded biomedical research projects.
Team: Lisa Simone, PhD (PI), Derek Kamper, PhD, Elie Elovic, MD, Gail Forrest, PhD, Walter Greenleaf, PhD, Yicheng Jia, Xun Luo, Brad Galego, Carlos Rosado, and Soha Saleh.
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In this project, we validated usefulness and repeatability of a custom
device to measure hand posture. The low cost Shadow Monitor
automatically measures finger posture during the performance of
everyday activities. It is designed for individuals with hand
dysfunction who cannot don normal gloves, and will be used to measure
improvements in function with rehabilitation, and to understand how
individuals perform daily activities.
Results show that this low
cost device clearly differentiates between functional ability level of
healthy individuals and those with hand function disabilities, with
measured differences in speed of performance, active range of motion,
and coordination. Repeatability results showed an overall error of 3.4
degrees, compared to 5.5 and 5.7 degrees reported with other sensor
gloves, and to manual measurements (5 to 8 degrees). Intraclass
coefficient of reliability ( using coefficient alpha) averaged 0.95.
Team: Lisa Simone, PhD (PI), Derek Kamper, PhD, Elie Elovic, MD, Walter Greenleaf, PhD, Yicheng Jia, Xun Luo.
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Understanding Difference in Function between Healthy Individuals and Individuals with Brain Injury
Individuals were asked to perform different tasks, and the joint angle bending in the fingers was measured over time. Understanding the difference in performance can help measure degree of disability and progress in therapy. On the left is an individual with no hand disability; on the right the individual has a moderate hand disability. Each is asked to pick up and move five cans. the plot for the healthy individual shows five clear peaks and valleys as the hand opens and closes. The individual with brain injury is unable to coordinate finger movements, and takes much longer to complete the task.
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| Healthy individual picking up cans |
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| Individual with brain injury picking cans |
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