Rehabilitation for stroke patients

The aim of the project is to develop a valid and mobile 3D motion feedback/forward system that supports the rehabilitation of functional impairments of the upper extremity in stroke patients.

Studies suggest that, on the one hand, functional electrical stimulation (FES) - the electrical stimulation of muscles relevant to movement during the performance of functional tasks - and, on the other hand, highly repetitive, task-specific training have positive effects on the rehabilitation of upper extremity function after stroke.

In this context, rehabilitation technology offers the opportunity to implement training independently with the desired parameters (intensity, frequency, etc.), which could increase the treatment dose and, consequently, the probability of treatment success.

However, systems that combine motion analysis and functional electrical stimulation are lacking so far, which makes the practical implementation of the promising, high training dose difficult, for example because human resources are missing and current systems cannot guarantee independent training in a mobile setting.

The system to be developed in this project should enable safe, task-specific training with FES for stroke patients even in the home setting. The patient's movement will be recorded by inertial measurement units (IMU) and the electrostimulation will be controlled by means of the movement analysis.

The university's focus is on the synthesis of the research status, the development of methods and measurement design, the data analysis and evaluation, the experimental execution of the measurement series for the development and verification of the prototype as well as the statistical analysis.

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