POLAND-HEALTH/REHABILITATION ROBOT Polish robot uses feedback from brain for muscle rehabilitation

Record ID: 401956

  • Title: POLAND-HEALTH/REHABILITATION ROBOT Polish robot uses feedback from brain for muscle rehabilitation
  • Date: 19th February 2015
  • Summary: VARIOUS PATIENT PERFORMING EXERCISE
  • Embargoed: 6th March 2015 12:00
  • Keywords:
  • Location: Poland
  • Country: Poland
  • Topics: General
  • Reuters ID: LVAC361W8NUROI8PIYLESH3X8Q4
  • Story Text: Engineers in Poland are offering new hope to patients with damaged muscles. The designers of "Luna", a rehabilitation robot for orthopaedic and neurological patients, have developed a reactive exercise regime, which directly reads signals from the brain to deteriorated muscles.
    It can perform exercises driven by EMG (electromyography) with the patient, use games to make rehabilitation more enjoyable and perform complex diagnostic tests. Until now, electromyography has been used in diagnostics to assess muscle and nerve health, but has not been used in rehabilitation, the designers of Luna say.
    Thanks to a 6-channel bioelectric amplifier, the robot can use electromyography as a reactive signal for exercises by amplifying nerve signals. This means patients with muscle atrophy can exercise even without using the strength of badly deteriorated muscles. Thanks to force-feedback the prototype robot can also change the resistance during training, allowing for isokinetic, isotonic and isometric exercises. Luna can detect as little as 0.2 Nm of movement in limbs, its designers say. Signals from nerves are increased up to 5000 times, and shown on diagrams on the device's screen and archived to estimate rehabilitation progress.
    "If we see weak muscles, it is still not bad. However we reach a certain stage at a certain moment of disease development, when the muscle tension is not even visible. Then we are not able to deal with it ourselves, but these signals can still be seen on our machines, "Luna" is still able to detect them. And based on that, when the brain sends a signal to the muscle flex, even though we don't see it, Luna is still able to detect it. It detects these signals and causes the movement of the limb, as if it were performed naturally," the designer of the Luna and owner of the company Egzotech that developed the prototype, Michal Mikulski, said. He went on to explain that when the human brain receives feedback that a signal to move muscles worked, this helps in re-establishing connections even with severely deteriorated muscles and nerves.
    "In this case the brain interprets that it gave a signal to the muscle and it worked because movement occurred, so I feel these impulses and my position in space, I see something happened, so I should give more of these signals. And in this way we are trying to reconstruct the parts of the connections which people are still able to make and thus help these patients," he said.
    One of the programs that Luna facilitates includes rehabilitation games for children, who often get bored by repetitive and monotonous movements. The applications encourage the patients to perform exercises without realising they are doing so. Mikulski emphasised that for children who have been through traumatic accidents, robots that make rehabilitation fun rather than a tedious extension of their trauma are a positive change.
    "On the device screen we are able to show games during which a child is still exercising, still engaging muscles, still increasing strength and coordination, but is in fact controlling an object in the game. Sometimes it is a spacecraft, sometimes shooting balls, sometimes flying a dragon. In any case, a child wants to win the game, wants to compete, but in fact they are exercising," he said.
    Once Luna is on the market, it will be designed to treat up to four patients at a time and will also include interactive games between patients. The last tests of the machine are coming to an end and it is planned to go into production in 2015.
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