Madison Bates is a University of Kentucky PhD Candidate in the Biomedical Engineering, Department within the College of Engineering. This startup is a closed team and she is not accepting new team members for this venture.
Bootcamp 1.0 Project Idea: Patients who have suffered from a stroke or spinal cord injury often have impaired function in the upper limbs. This impaired motor function in the hands can severely hinder the patient’s ability to participate in activities of daily living. Therefore, it is imperative to determine the level of severity of the impairment to establish what rehabilitation strategy will maximize their chances of recovery. Current clinical functional tests (e.g., Fugl-Meyer Assessment) usually provide coarse composite scores based on several activities; moreover, they are time-consuming and require clinical experience to administer. To provide a more reliable solution, there is a need for convenient devices to provide a comprehensive assessment of these impaired hands. In a literature review we published on hand-worn sensor-based devices for rehabilitation and assessment, we found that few tools exist for assessment of hand function and that there is a lack of convenient and affordable devices that accurately track finger movement and applied pressure.
Therefore, we have been developing a sensor glove to track hand movement and applied pressure accurately and objectively for functional assessment in stroke patients. We have currently built two prototypes and are working on a third version of the glove, which will be used in a validation study with neuro-typical human participants this fall. Once the glove is proven to be feasible for tracking hand movement in neuro-typical individuals, we will move on to testing its ability to be used as a functional assessment and rehabilitation tool. The end goal for this project is to provide an effective and objective tool for clinical assessment that increases the accuracy of recovery tracking in stroke rehabilitation. Additionally, we want to expand on the potential uses for the glove by determining its effectiveness as a rehabilitation tool to provide real-time feedback to individuals as a way to motivate them to continue their treatment.
The BIG DREAM is to establish a rehabilitation device company. The company will focus on research and development of medical devices to improve neurological rehabilitation and therapeutic strategies to maximize the patient’s physical, psychological, and functional recovery. The sensor glove is the first device of many, which I hope to create to improve the assessment and rehabilitation of people who have suffered from neurological trauma.
Co-Founder / Team Leader: Madison Bates
Email: mlba283@uky.edu
Co-Founder / Principle Investigator (PI): Sridhar Sunderam, PhD, Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Biomedical Engineering, Department within the College of Engineering
Project Owner
Madison Bates