Hello everybody.
Has anyone tried to use a robotic rehab glove,and to what success please?
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Not needed one myself but try looking in the link below as someone else asked about a while ago.
I am interested in this too - have looked online at Music Glove put out by Flint Rehab, but it is pretty expensive, and no-one here had used it. It looked brilliant, but I didnāt know if it would really work for me - if it was as effective as they said, why wasnāt everyone using it?
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I too looked at the flint music glove and havenāt bought it.
Iām firmly of the opinion Iād rather have a working right hand than money in the bank but I still wasnāt tempted yet. Iāve seen first hand accounts of using other products that they sell in their Facebook group and generally the user community seems to be pretty happy. Not entirely but then thatās probably just human nature.
My reasoning for not (yet?) buying was first of all how much value would I get from it? Which I partly answered by my experiences with a neurofenex neuro ball and a gripable as well as the grasp program and the CIMT programs of exercise.
With both neuroball and grippable I found the software so simplistic that the cleverness of the electronics and the Wi-Fi and all the other techy aspects meant that the total system was less useful to me than my three foot long piece of broom handle that I use to exercise my wrist and fingers. If youāre in the first few months and want to practise wrist flexion in isolation to the complex integrated movements there would be necessary to pick up a coffee cup then both gripable and neuroball may be helpful for a couple of months but equally so would a tennis ball and a copy of the grasp manuals which are freely available online
I think with all of these tools and programs they need to be matched to the developmental stage of the evolving recovery journey on a week by week well maybe monrh by month basis - There was a post yesterday about whether the Wii is useful and Iāve certainly heard good things about its use. Because itās designed for games with able-bodied people it does integrate all of the movements necessary simultaneously to perform game type activities by extension daily living and it has the game generated dopamine hit to encourage continued use
Flint rehab do export to the UK. I believe there is some degree of support. I also noticed that they discount their web price on occasions like black Friday by a fairly reasonable amount.
Ciao
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Thanks for your message, this would help to keep fingers going i.e. maintain muscle lenght but would not help to regain movement. I hope this helps.
Kind regards
Kusal Stroke OT
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Hi @Kusal
Is your assessment based on any lived experience or do you have professional experience of the various different makes - for example the pneumatic ones?, the less robotic but spring and rubber band driven ones such as sabo?
As the owner of a naf hand first challenges is to connect the brain to it and even if it wonāt move the feeling that the brain is talking to it seems, in my very limited, but very direct, experience to be step one, step two is then to accompany that feeling with some movement which can happily be passive to start. It confirms or corrects shortening and tightening, and step three seems to be muscle building, and step four seems to be integration of simultaneous muscle activations and deactivations to achieve functional use.
Iām somewhere at steps one two three and four with different aspects of my hand recovery. The whole approach needs to be taken at the wrist as well and thatās where hand exercises seem to have a gap. Shoulder elbow wrist & hand as a unit and fingers individually all have complexity and all the complexities need to be integrated for functionality.
As I said at the head of this thread I havenāt used robotic gloves and I am interested in the music glove and I have used a sabo which I didnāt find at all useful but I have used grippable and neuroball and my summary would be an āinteresting step in the right direction and definitely with potential but clearly with many years of development to address needs equal to everyday living, possibly useful now if used in early parts of the journey but not late on because theyāre too naive.ā
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Dear Simon,
Thanks for your reply. What you are saying is perfectly true both from theory and perpective of a service user (I am an OT, but I have met 1200+ stroke survivors). The four stages that you have described is correct, and after stroke the whole hand moves like a unit (association), and there are steps that I suggest to people I treat to overcome this- slow process but definitely works. I have not used a music glove, but from the description for it to work you have to have pretty good level of finger movement - in particular finger extension. For me, the gloves are a comfort tool rather than treatment entity. I was involved in the development phase of neuroball 1 and neuroball 2, I agree with your views. I just completed a 2 day training at UCLH- basically, the hands on traditional therapy is still the best. Upper limb rehab after stroke is an art and that is the bottom line.
I hope that this helps.
Take care
Kusal
Stroke OT
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I donāt wish a stroke on you or anybody else but one dayās lived experience trumps your 1200 meetings.
You may be a force of nature; I give you the benefit of that doubt because I donāt know. But I do observe your behaviour here; You sign all of your posts with your ārankā. A badge of difference cuz all of the rest of us are here because of who we are. Our motivations is to support each other. Whatās yours?
If youāve developed a program based on the observations youāll be a first in my experience. Iāve only met a few OTs and PTs and I have experienced their inabilities and the lack of integration of factors. Iām not aware of any meaningful way I could access care I need. Certainly attempts to escalate within the health service have been skillfully deflected, absorbed and dissipated without action, without change.
In general Iāve noticed the health service has some significant gaps that unlink the need (and the benefits to be gained from) to be customer driven, has no visible concept of service improvement, no understanding of maturity models or what it takes to drive Itās own capability enhancement. There are elaborate cultural and procedural mechanisms to protect themselves subtlety at the expense of their customers who they insist on calling patients thereby establishing a power dynamic that is equivalent to what women have had to dispel by removing the word chairman from everyday language. For example have you shared the joke āever met a patient who did their repetitions?"
So Iāve had a disappointing experience with people who sign their names with your sort of badge
disappointed with everything apart from their empathy. The individual people are often dedicated but theyāre doing a job and theyāre in a system thatās dysfunctional and creaking and in the case of lived experience of stroke deficient.
There are a growing number of posts from OT etc who have had strokes & subsequently said how much theyāre understanding was deficient prior to their stroke for example see
Lucindaās comment
You have to scroll down to get to her post on the thread
And there are many others like Jill Taylor or Udo Kischka (& Helen Kennerley) on TED, in books and elsewhere .
There is the potential for good debate here. I think one input to that is probably you clarifying why youāre here?
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Hi Simon,
Thanks for your post.
I would be honest with you, I have not used all the gloves - but I would like to say one thing, the main course of treatment still remains traditional exercises/massage and so on, the technology is an adjunct to traditional therapy only, they have not reached the point that they can replace traditional therapy. People try to sell all sorts of stuff. I agree with your summary of neuroball. The music glove is in the same category but slightly different. The questions is do have any tightness or spasticity- if you are experiencing any of above, I would suggest to deal with them before trailing anything. All the robotics has the danger of increasing impairments through compensation.
I hope that I have made sense.
Kind regards
Kusal, Stroke OT
I have also answered your question re: why I have joined the forum in a different post. I hope this makes sense. I am different, when I treat hand I start with foot prep - most people would not do this.
Kind regards
Kusal, Stroke OT
Hi @Kusal
Well thatās interesting because one of therapies I do for myself is washing the roof of the car. I do that with a move toward standing one leg because otherwise my right foot toes have an associated reaction with my attempts to put my hand down flat on the wash mitt. I have described that in another post on here as well as my escapades hedge trimming up a ladder. These are all quite deliberate exercise efforts
I attempted to give feedback to both neurofenics and grippable about some very easy adjustments to make to the software that they currently have which wouldnāt require any hardware changes so would be very fungible and cheap; but I got nowhere. the frontline people donāt convey things to the back office folk or if they do thereās no loop .
There are also a few professors etc that Iāve tried to discuss with and theyāre all (feign?) interested at the time but they donāt follow through (or just have short attention spans outside whatās already in their mental model & the agenda they already have)
Iām not sure if you could say I have a physiotherapist. I havenāt been discharged but I donāt get to see this woman more than once every 3 months. She arrogantly contradicts my descriptions to tell me all my problems with my upper limb are to do with tendon shortening. I suspect sheās 10% right which makes a 90% wrong and 100% deaf
When I wake up in the morning before I get out of bed I can stretch the fingers of my right hand out absolutely straight and my wrist back. I can only do that in rare circumstances when Iām up on my feet and generally if I got my arm above my head. So there might be some tendons shortening but much more prevalent is inability to fire the right muscles and a confusion in brain signals to the wrong muscles.
I use showering and washing my left armpit with my right hand as daily therapy and Iām now almost at the point that I can hold the soap in the palm of my right hand although I canāt then move the right hand upwards from armpit towards elbow because that combination of muscles activated and relaxed still allude to me. I also attempt to do some gilding as a distraction and Iāve been trying to use a scalpel right-handed to cut my materials. I havenāt yet got the muscles to emulate what I used to do pre-stroke but at least I am 3% of the way there where is previously such an aspiration was very far over the horizon in front of me. It is now my current capability limit.
Youāll have seen in the other thread that I suggested comparing notes with @llareggub & yourself. Rich maybe too busy short-term Iām happy to follow up with you onto one in the meantime if you wantā¦
Hi Simon,
Thanks for your response. I am glad to hear that you recognise the signs of associated reaction and you are taking step to deal with it. In my view associated reactions stems from postural imbalance or weakness, if you are getting associated reaction, I would suggest
- Dealing with trunk weakness: e.g. bridging with one or two legs
- Focusing on scapula: through massage shoulder shurg and depression, scpaula retraction and massage
- Stretching pecs
I guess your tunk will be rotated and pelvis would be dropped on the affected side.
It would be nice to catch up with you at some point.
I hope that I am making sense 
Take care
Kusal, Stroke OT
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