Stroke is considered one of the leading causes of disability in India & the world. More than 80% of patients suffer weakness or paralysis of one side of the body. Exercise is a good practice to improve post-stroke functional problems. Exercise intensity increases the blood and oxygen flow of the brain, and thus the brain repairs and reorganizes itself by generating new communication.
A new device promises to make stroke rehabilitation fun!
To deliver support to recover the patient’s physical ability by repetitive task training, BeAble Health, an Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad (IIT-H) incubated startup, introduced ArmAble, an interactive arm training rehabilitative device offering arm rehabilitation solutions.
Armable enables higher repetitions that stimulate the brain to rewire and strengthen neural connections. The higher repetitions compared to traditional therapy help to recover the arm functionality much faster.
It is aimed at conditions such as cerebral palsy, multiple sclerosis, traumatic brain injury, fracture, and frozen shoulder.
According to the report, a press release by IIT-H said the ‘ArmAble’ was recently unveiled by NITI Aayog’s vice chairman Rajiv Kumar during the seventh foundation day celebrations of the Biotechnology Industry Research Assistance Council (BIRAC) in Delhi.
“Stroke patients who suffer from paralysis of the arm are particularly advised to perform regular exercises. However, traditional therapies tend to be tiring and boring. Consequently, patients do not perform their exercises fully. Currently, patients, on an average, do 30-40 repetitions of movements in a day. This is hardly enough. Research suggests that they need 400-600 repetitions of the movements every day,” explained Habib Ali, founder of the startup, BeAble, while speaking to India Science Wire.
How ArmAble works?
ArmAble is an affordable, simple Plug&Play, game-based arm rehabilitation device. To make the session more engaging and fun-filled, the immersive games were developed exclusively for arm therapy.
It consists of a console on which several games keep playing out one after the other. This helps the device motivate the patients to engage in therapy using the immersive games, leading to increased repetition. The high number of repetitions increases the recovery of the arm function.
The device has another interesting feature, telerehabilitation. It connects the therapist to patients by remotely connecting through a cloud platform. The therapist can monitor and analyze the progress of their patient’s recovery by looking at the movement data such as patterns, speed, accuracy, etc.
Besides Habib, the team that developed ArmAble consisted of Dr. Senthil K, Sreehari K.G., Lokesh Kumar, Munish Raj, Vivek Bhageria, and Shikha Soni.
