Design of a robotic sensorimotor system for Phantom Limb Pain rehabilitation

Abstract

The use of robotics in rehabilitation has shown to have a positive outcome when applied to stroke patients and other movement based therapies. Despite recent studies looking at these types of therapies in helping patients with Phantom Limb Pain very few have looked at employing the elements that make robotics successful with stroke patients towards amputees. Phantom Limb Pain affects the majority of amputees, resulting in the need for further study due to the vast range of potential treatments available. This paper examines the effects of Phantom Limb Pain, its treatment, paradigms based on robotic rehabilitation, and provides an outline of a possible therapy method based on an immersive system providing proprioceptive and kinaesthetic feedback to the user while performing a manipulation task.

An Investigation into the Dissipation of Vibrations Using Electromyography towards the Development of Self-Adapting Robotic Prosthesis

“…The combination of accurate sensory feedback and effective prosthetic control provides better embodiment and functionality for prosthetic users [1]. This allows for finer motor control for complex tasks and an overall reduction of rejection rates for prosthesis, potentially leading to long term prosthetic use and treatment of neuropathic pain [2,3].…”

New Technologies and Applications of Motion Tracking in Virtual Reality Systems

“…The idea of presence and awareness in virtual reality frameworks was investigated in the early-and mid-2000s. 3,6 Medical applications for this principle have been investigated in the current years with research works including lessening phantom limb pain, 7,14 gaining useful abilities in patients with cerebral paralysis, 21 accomplishing upper limb rehabilitation of stroke patients 26 and enhancing balance and postural stability in patients with diabetic peripheral neuropathy. 17 Also, the use of virtual reality in neuroscience has been lately explored.…”

Correlating Vibration Patterns to Perception of Tactile Information for Long-Term Prosthetic Limb Use and Continued Rehabilitation of Neuropathic Pain

“…It was found that long term, continued use of a hand prosthesis, as well as effective embodiment of the device, can lead to a reduction in neuropathic pain, for example, phantom limb pain [1]. Considerable work has been reported in the literature to improve embodiment and long-term adoption of prosthetic hand via the enhancement of effective sensory feedback from the device [1][2][3][4][5]. Somatotopically mapped feedback is often used in hand prostheses to provide information on grasping, texture, and the shape of objects [6].…”

“…Time and frequency domain features of muscle activity are often used for movement, position, and gesture classification of hand prostheses to varying degrees of success [13,14]. In an analogous way to sensory feedback, individual differences, 1 Morenike Reni Magbagbeola and Rui Loureiro are with the Wellcome-EPSRC Centre for Interventional and Surgical Science (WEISS) and with Aspire Centre for Rehabilitation Engineering and Assistive Technology (CREATe), University College London, United Kingdom email:{ morenike.magbagbeola.16@ucl.ac.uk , r.loureiro@ucl.ac.uk} 2 Mark Miodownik is with the department of Mechanical Engineering, University College London, United Kingdom 3 Stephen Hailes is with the department of Computer Science, University College London, United Kingdom along with sensor placement and electrical noise, affect the quality of the signal recorded. Modern techniques in machine learning and deep learning, such as recurrent neural network (RNN) or, in some cases, convolutional neural network (CNN) algorithms, have shown promising results in feature extraction and sequence classification of these types of signals [15,16].…”