Smart Glove Speeds Rehabilitation Of Stroke Patients

Dec 25, 2015

A Korean health tech company, Neofect, has created a smart rehabilitation solution for stroke patients who need to learn how to reuse their hands. The glove is designed to induce neural plasticity in the patient through specific and customized exercises with gamification.

According to a 2014 study by the World Heart Federation, approximately five million people globally affected by a stroke annually. The same study also notes that for the next 20 years stroke mortality will triple in Latin America, the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa.

Neofect’s product, the Rapael Smart Glove is a wearable rehabilitation glove that will help stroke patients regain movement through repeat hand and arm movements in a virtual reality-type setting. The glove has built in sensors that measure the patient’s movements as they do rehabilitation exercises and is all connected via an app.

Neofect added gamification elements to keep patients engaged and maintain interest in the repetitive rehabilitation exercises. The gamification elements are designed to motivate the patient throughout the rehab process.

Rehabilitation games are updated monthly and each game is designed for the rehabilitation around certain movements. For finger flexion and extension, there’s an exercise of  squeezing an orange and for forearm pronation and supination, which helps you turn your palm either face up or face down, there’s a wine pouring exercise.

The system records all the practices of the patient and then uploads that data where they and their physical therapist can see their progress. Updates and training tasks are based on the patient’s activity level and the system can create new exercises and tasks based on patient’s data and progress.

The hardware, aka the smart glove, has Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) sensors to capture the motion of hand and wrist movements. It also has bending sensors to detect bending in one direction or another. All the sensors are connected to a computer system that computes the amount of individual finger movement of the patient.

The smart glove is also lightweight, coming in at 132 grams which is slightly heavier than one cup of flour which weighs about 128 grams.

The company has total funding of $5 million funding from a variety of investors including $180,000 m from POSCO Venture Partners, $900,000 m from DSC Investment and Company K Partners and $4 million from SBI Korea, DSC Investment and Sejong Venture Partners.

Source: Forbes Tech