Robotic Interventions for Spasticity Treatment

In the researchers' words

The researchers have developed games controlled by electromyographic (EMG) and inertial measurement unit (IMU) activity recorded by a sensor. These will provide biofeedback to participants post-stroke about the activity of their paretic muscles. The researchers anticipate that providing visual biofeedback will allow subjects to observe the level of co-activation in an agonist-antagonist muscle pair, and therefore initiate interventions to reduce their level of co-activation. Similarly, the researchers will provide additional haptic feedback using an assistive robot at the ankle joint (i.e., M1) and compare the results with the pure visual feedback condition. At the end, the main objective is to compare 1) conventional robotic continuous passive movement (CPM) training to 2) training with visual biofeedback and 3) training with both visual and haptic biofeedback.