Gr!pp: Integrating Activities of Daily Living into Hand Rehabilitation

Abstract

Impaired hand function impacts many stroke patients' daily lives, leading to a lack of independence and difficulty in performing activities of daily living (ADL). There are various assistive devices and interactive exercise monitoring systems that aim to help stroke patients perform unsupervised at-home hand rehabilitation exercises. However, for these efforts to work, the patients are required to self-supervise their rehabilitation process at home and allocate time in their daily schedule, which often is challenging. In this paper, we propose an alternative method. We hypothesize and test the idea of seamlessly integrating hand rehabilitation exercises with the products used for cooking. To this aim, we followed a research through design approach, developed Gr!pp and tested it with two stroke patients. Our results show that Gr!pp can facilitate intuitive use by its form. We also found other application areas of Gr!pp (e.g., eating) and improvement points (e.g., gamification) to promote motivation. We conclude our paper with further implications and our contribution to the tangible interaction design field. CCS CONCEPTS• User centred design; • Interactive Systems and Tools; • Empirical studies in interaction design;

A Novel Model for the Material Selection of Smart Objects for Hand-Rehabilitation: A Case Study

“…If no material can be selected at the end of the selection cycle, a revision is required in the requirements set or the product's design. We employed our previously published related work to test the hybrid material selection model for DIHP (Stefess et al, 2022). Gr!pp is an add-on grip for helping stroke patients practice certain grasps.…”

“…All participants signed a form agreeing their data could be used. Following, we presented the 3D prototypes, which are different material versions of the Gr!pp (Stefess et al, 2022). We asked the participants to rate the prototypes on 12 statements indicated on a material selection form on a 5-point Likert scale (1=fully disagree, 5=fully agree) and how important they deem the statements on a 3-point Likert scale (1= not important, 3= very important).…”

“…Various interactive conceptual products have been developed to address this problem. Some of these are game and functionality based (e.g., Smart Boards (Park et al, 2018) and wearable gloves (Friedman et al, 2014)) products, while some of them tackle incorporating the activities of daily living into at-home hand rehabilitation (e.g., eating (Stefess et al, 2022)) and drinking activities Hover et al,2023). However, even though very promising, such concepts are far from further implementation due to several challenges.…”