NCT03483766

Robotic Rehabilitation for Spinal Cord Injury

Individualized Robotic Functional Rehabilitation for Spinal Cord Injury

• Status: Completed
• Phase: N/A
• Study type: Interventional
• Enrollment: 5 (actual)
• Sponsor: The University of Hong Kong · Academic / Other
• Sex: All
• Age: 18 Years
• Healthy volunteers: Not accepted

Summary

Individuals with spinal cord injury (SCI) have significant functional loss and poor quality of life. Individuals with cervical SCI are suffering much worse sickness within the SCI population. Tetraplegia resulting from cervical SCI bring a formidable emotional, physical, and financial burden in our society. Hand function is especially important to people with tetraplegia. Hand function is associated with independence in many activities, and impairments in upper extremity function can compound difficulties in many other areas, such as bowel and bladder management. Thus, it is not surprising that restoring hand function was found to be a priority for individuals with tetraplegia. Nowadays, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) plays an essential role in the diagnosis of SCI and helps to monitor disease progression and efficacy of therapies. Advanced MRI techniques, such as diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) and functional MRI (fMRI), have shown the potential to improve the understanding of human spinal cord in healthy and pathological condition, and serve as imaging biomarkers to characterize damage degree, monitor the response to treatment, and predict the outcome of intervention. Meanwhile, multi-channel EMG (Electromyography) recordings can provide a mapping of neuromuscular activities from an electrode-array. The application of robotics in upper extremity function restoration of SCI patients has been started to help SCI patients to recovery upper extremity function. Combined DTI and fMRI to monitor the recovery of upper extremity function of SCI patients, this project will provide a tailored-made EMG driven soft-robotic hand prosthesis for tetraplegia individuals. We will provide the individuals with neuromuscular rehabilitation to preserve the residual function and to enhance the functional recovery. The eventual goal is to further design a useful robotic hand for regaining partial daily function to improve the quality of life for those individuals with tetraplegia.

Conditions

• Spinal Cord Injury

Interventions

Type	Name	Description
DEVICE	Robotic Functional Rehabilitation system	The tailored-made EMG driven soft-robotic hand prosthesis for tetraplegia individuals may help to preserve the residual function and to enhance the functional recovery.

Timeline

• Start date: 2017-09-01
• Primary completion: 2020-05-31
• Completion: 2020-05-31
• First posted: 2018-03-30
• Last updated: 2023-05-11

Locations

1 site across 1 country: Hong Kong