SAN ANTONIO, Feb. 8 (UPI) -- A robot arm only 30 inches long, developed by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is helping stroke victims recover the partial ability to move their limbs.
The researchers' device, named "Manus," was unveiled Friday at an American Stroke Association conference. They said it could help provide inexpensive home therapy in future exercising a patient's limbs much as a physical therapist would.
"The robot could be ideal for home therapy because it can be programmed remotely by hooking it up to a phone line," said lead researcher Susan Fasoli, an occupational therapist at MIT in Cambridge, Mass. "By having that Internet connection, a therapist on the other end of the line could help monitor progress."
Other medical scientists said, however, further studies are needed to determine the robot's therapeutic value.
"It's interesting, but it's hard to know what the significance actually is because this wasn't a controlled study -- there weren't comparison groups," said neurologist Larry Goldstein of Duke University in Durham, N.C., spokesperson for the American Stroke Association. "This needs to be compared with other treatments with a similar regimen, such as working with a physical or occupational therapist, or having a caretaker help a person through similar sorts of exercise, or even the patients exercising themselves."
The robot -- whose name is Latin for hand -- is designed to help aid stroke victims who lost the ability to use one arm. Manus stands on a black round hub on a table and has an arm about 2 feet long with a supportive harness at the end. The patient's affected arm is secured into the harness and programmed motions help guide the patient's arms toward a target on a connected computer screen.
Rehabilitation therapists believe repetitive motions can rebuild nerve pathways from the brain to the injured limb.
"This cortical reorganization appears to continue even years after the initial injury," Fasoli said.
These new findings also suggest that robot-assisted therapy can help stroke survivors recover movement even years after a stroke. Most recovery is currently believed to happen only within the first six months after a stroke.
"By doing this research, we can not only help people regain movement, but we also learn more about the process of motor recovery after stroke," Fasoli said in an interview with United Press International.
Fasoli added the robot also has the potential advantages of low cost and ease of use when compared to traditional therapy.
"Continuing rehabilitation with a physical or occupational therapist is very labor intensive and long term it can be very costly," she explained. "One of the challenges of being an therapist is that health care reimbursements have significantly declined over the years. As a result, a person's length of stay in a rehabilitation hospital or access to therapy has decreased."
Fasoli said the robot is able to provide intensive, repetitive movement therapy that occupational or physical therapists do not have time to provide in the clinic.
Manus helped 13 stroke survivors at Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital in Boston, average age 60, to regain partial arm movement up to five years after a stroke. The patients received hour-long treatments three times a week for six weeks, and afterward had improved shoulder and upper arm mobility.
The results are encouraging, Fasoli said, but real progress will be made when stroke victims can improve hand and wrist movements. This is the goal of a future robots.
"The use of robotic therapy in the home is still a ways off," Fasoli told UPI. "The wrist device is close to coming online, within the next six months for use in the clinic. The hand device is a little more trickier, but we have more simple grasp devices that we'll begin employing soon."
(UPI Photo No. WAX2002020602 is available for this story.)
(Reported by Charles Choi in New York.)
