Most exoskeleton research has focused on helping paralyzed people to walk upright and for soldiers and workers to easily carry heavy loads. At the National Institutes of Health’s Clinical Center Rehabilitation Medicine Department researchers built an exoskeleton to improve the walking gait of children with cerebral palsy. Many children w (Read more...)
Tag: Rehab
3D-Printed Robotic Arm for Sign Language Translation
A team of engineers at the University of Antwerp in The Netherlands has developed a 3D-printed robotic arm that can act as a sign language translator for deaf people. Sign language interpreters are often in short supply, and so this research team set out to develop a low cost automated system that can translate text […]
Prototype ARKE Exoskeleton Features Alexa Voice Controls
Bionik Laboratories, a company based in Toronto, Canada, is developing a lower body exoskeleton to get wheelchair bound people to start walking again. Currently in its second generation prototype, the ARKE exoskeleton is designed to be light, powerful, efficient, and perhaps most importantly, aiming to achieve a comfortable and natural walking (Read more...)
PhysioSensing Smart Pressure Pad to Improve Rehab: Interview with Sensing Future’s Pedro De Jesus Mendes
Sensing Future Technologies, a startup company based in Coimbra, Portugal, has developed a system called PhysioSensing that relies on a dense electronic pressure pad to assess a variety of characteristics about a person’s physical state, including balance, limits of stability, and related parameters. It can also be used, in a combination (Read more...)
Biofeedback System for Parkinson’s Rehab
Researchers at the University of Houston have developed wearable technology to assist Parkinson’s patients to perform rehabilitation exercises in their own home. Parkinson’s symptoms include resting tremors, muscle rigidity, and postural instability. Parkinson’s patients can fall easily, leading to injuries and difficulty performi (Read more...)
Robotic Training System Improves Walking Gait in Children with Cerebral Palsy
Many children with cerebral palsy exhibit what is known as a “crouch gait,” a walking style that involves an unusually great deal of bending of the hip, knee, or ankle joints. This makes walking difficult and often exhausting, effectively limiting the activities that a child can participate in. At Columbia University a new robotic syste (Read more...)
Xavant’s NMS 460 Peripheral Nerve Stimulator for Pain Relief Cleared by FDA
Xavant Technology, a company based in Pretoria, South Africa, won FDA clearance for its NMS 460 peripheral nerve stimulation system. The device is used to address chronic intractable pain, post-surgical pain, post-traumatic acute pain, and for pain control arising from rehab routines. The device delivers a hybrid pulsed radio fr (Read more...)
Smart Undergarment to Prevent Back Pain
Engineers at Vanderbilt University have developed a smart undergarment that supports the back during lifting tasks, to reduce the risk of back injury. The team recently unveiled the technology at the Congress of the International Society of Biomechanics in Brisbane, Australia. “I’m sick of Tony Stark and Bruce Wayne being the only ones (Read more...)
Soft Wearable Exosuit Helps Stroke Patients to Walk
Researchers at Harvard and Boston University have developed and tested a soft, wearable exosuit on stroke patients with limited mobility, and found that it can help to promote normal walking. In approximately 80% of stroke patients one limb stops functioning normally. This can cause long-term abnormalities in gait that can reduce a patient&rsq (Read more...)
Smart Hanging Robot Keeps People Walking During Rehab
At the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland, a new robotic rehabilitation system has been developed that’s smart enough to continuously and very finely adjust itself to the patient’s rehab needs. The robot consists of a harness suspended from the ceiling that is pulled on by motors up (Read more...)
Cochlear Unveils Nucleus 7, World’s First Made for iPhone Cochlear Implant Sound Processor (Interview)
Cochlear, a medical device company at the forefront of the world’s hearing implant market, has announced the Nucleus 7 Sound Processor, the world’s first Made for iPhone cochlear implant sound processor, in partnership with Apple. Known for it’s Nucleus cochlear implant and Baha bone conduction implant technologies, (Read more...)
Scientists Convince Stem Cells Within Brain to Migrate Toward Injury
To be able to fix the fine structure of damaged neural networks using transplanted stem cells would require a way to guide the stem cells to line up in a desired way. Researchers from University of California, Davis and Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China have discovered that they can use electric current to point to […]
Microsoft Seeing AI App for Blind People Describes The World Around
Microsoft has released an iPhone app for blind people and those with significantly decreased vision. Seeing AI, as the app is called, does its magic when the user points the smartphone’s camera at something and it reads out what it’s seeing. For example, pointing it at a person, it tries to identify if it’s someone […]
Low Cost Glove Translates Sign Language, May Be Used to Practice Surgery in Virtual Reality
At the University of California San Diego engineers have developed a low-cost electronic glove capable of understanding sign language. A user simply puts it on and can sign away, with the glove wirelessly transmitting what it’s interpreting to another device to be read out or for the words to appear on a screen. The cost […]
Million Electrode Array for Brain Interfaces Is Under Development
Researchers at Columbia University are working on substantially improving the abilities of brain-computer interfaces by creating a high density electrode array that can stimulate and read the brain at high precision. The research is part of DARPA’s Neural Engineering System Design (NESD) project that is working on all the different piece (Read more...)
Optical Fiber for Movement-Free Activation of Select Neurons in Brain
Researchers from Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia in Lecce, Italy and Harvard Medical School created a probe designed for optogenetic applications. Optogenetics is a recently developed technique that allows scientists to selectively activate neurons within the brain, and this technology may one day be used as a therapeutic tool to treat a varie (Read more...)
Penclic R2 Ergonomic Mouse Review: Comfortable, but Is It Enough?
Using computer mice more than 20 hours per week is associated with carpal tunnel syndrome. Classic computer mice force users into a pronated forearm position, placing stress on the nerves of the carpal tunnel (a sheath in the wrist through which tendons and nerves pass through). The PenClic R2 is an unconventional mouse that aims to […]
Closed Loop System Reads Brain Activity to Activate Neurostimulator Only When Needed
At the University of Washington researchers have been focusing on drastically improving the longevity and performance of deep brain stimulators for people suffering from essential tremor. These devices, implanted like pacemakers with electrode leads stretching up into the brain, run on internal batteries. The devices, not knowing when to quiet the (Read more...)
Fingertip Simulator Models Nerve Activity to Introduce Sense of Touch to Prostheses
At the University of Chicago neuro researchers are working on studying how the nerves in a person’s fingertips communicate with the brain to relay tactile sensations. They hope their understanding will lead to technologies that enable the sense of touch in prosthetic devices and to that end they’ve built a simulator that replicates the (Read more...)
New Way to Optimize Exoskeletons Helps to Drastically Improve Their Efficiency
Exoskeletons that help people with mobility issues have been in development for quite some time now and some even been approved by the FDA for at-home use. Though there’s already a great deal of technology built into these types of devices, they remain clunky, imperfect, and produce a gait that resembles that of robots in old […]