Enhancements of a tongue-operated robotic rehabilitation system

Abstract

Patients suffering from traumatic brain or spinal cord injuries may benefit from neuroplasticity guided and reinforced by motor learning feedback through reorganization of the neural pathways in intact parts of the brain and spinal cord. An enhanced version of a tongue-operated robotic rehabilitation system is presented for accelerating the rate of improvement in the upper extremity motor functions for patients with severe hemiparesis following stroke. A new rehabilitation robot, called Hand Mentor Pro <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">TM</sup> (HM), was utilized by reading its pressure and joint angle sensors, combined with control commands from the Tongue Drive System (TDS) to enable both isometric and isotonic target-tracking tasks in a coordinated tongue-hand rehabilitation paradigm. Preliminary results in 3 healthy subjects who performed a sinusoidal target tracking task demonstrated the TDS-HM system functionality in hand-operated isometric, hand-operated isotonic, tongue-operated isotonic discrete control and tongue-operated isotonic proportional control modes with average normalized root-mean-square errors of 0.058±0.023, 0.043±0.011, 0.184±0.087, and 0.148±0.075, respectively.