Aravind successfully defended his PhD work on the hand rehabilitation robot ‘PLUTO’ today. He started his journey in January 2018, and 5 years, 6 months, and 10 days later he’s finally done! Aravind’s work has been received well from many fronts, which is evident from the numerous awards he has received over the years. Let’s just look at some numbers:
Number of clinics/research groups using the device: 7 in India, 1 in Ireland
Number of patients that have used the device in some form: 500+!!!
Number of clinicians that have used the device in some form: 50+!!!
Number of patients that have used the device at home: 8
Number of clinical studies completed/ongoing: 2
Number of awards won: 5
Well done, Aravind. We look forward to seeing some great things from you to promote technology for neurorehab!
We celebrated the “International Women’s Day in Engineering” at the lab on June 23, to show our appreciation for the female members of the group, for their contributions and for the unique perspective they bring to the group and its activities.
Prof. Suresh, who was the former head and the founder of the Department of Bioengineering visited the department on June 13. It was great to learn about the exciting things he is doing in IIT Jammu, and the side projects he is working on. He gave a lecture on Antialiasing and Sampling to the students and project staffs in the department. We eagerly wait for his next visit to the department.
Our PhD student, Aravind Nehrujee was awarded the “IFNR Young Investigator Award 2023” at the IFNRCON 2023 in Mumbai for his works on PLUTO, robot-assisted home study, and human-human interaction. We look forward to seeing more such work in the future, and we extend our warmest congratulations to Aravind, again! :)
Our MS student, Sriramachandran joins back as Project staff. He will be continuing his work on Hypercube with design fixations and clinical trials. Welcome back :)
We welcome back Ann, who now joins us as a Post-Doctoral Researcher in collaboration with IIT Madras. She will be working on the “Design and development of devices and techniques for upper-limb neurorehabilitation” collaboratively with Prof. Sujatha Srinivasan from Dept. of Mechanical Engineering, IIT Madras.
Group’s first PhD, Ann David has successfully defended her thesis on July 13, 2022. Her thesis was on “Arm use asymmetry in healthy persons and persons with hemiparesis”. She was co-guided by Dr. Varadhan SKM from Dept. of Applied Mechanics, IIT Madras.
We welcome our two new PhD students, Neelakshi and Parvathy! Neelakshi will be working on “Understanding the role of robotic assistance in upper-limb neurorehabilitation” in collaboration with Prof. Sujatha Srinivasan from Dept. of Mechanical Engineering, IIT Madras. Parvathy will be working on “Applying ML/AI methods for arm use assessment with wearable sensors” in collaboration with Dr. Varadhan SKM from Dept. of Applied Mechanics, IIT Madras. Look forward to working together! :)
Thira Rehab Solutions - a start up from the BioRehab group and the R2D2 lab from IIT Madras recieved the TANSEED award from the Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu - Mr. M K Stalin. The award was seed funding of INR 10 Lakhs to help develop PLUTO into a commercial prototype. Aravind received the check for INR 5 Lakhs at the secretariat and gave a short interview to Kalaignar TV.
What is the simplest possible robot for hand neurorehabilitation? What can such a robot do for training and assessing hand functions? Aravind’s doctoral research focuses on the development and clinical validation of a modular, single DOF robot for hand neurorehabilitation - PLUTO. In this paper, we present the design and preliminary validation of the first version of PLUTO, which was tested on patients, clinicians, and caregivers at CMC Vellore.
While exploring different methods for quantifying upper-limb use as part of Ann’s PhD work, we realized the need for a proper framework for assessing upper-limb functioning in hemiparetic patients. Various groups have been publishing methods for visualizing and quantifying upper-limb functioning using wearable sensors. But often we found that the definitions of different terms were unclear. This work proposes a framework starting with clear definitions of different constructs of interest. We also present systematic analysis of different ways of visualzing data collected from sensors, along with a couple of metrics for quantifying upper-limb activity and relative upper-limb use. The data collected from Ann’s previous study was used to demonstrate some of the ideas presented in the paper.
A part of Ann’s PhD work was recently published in JRATE. This work focuses on the use of a inertial measurement units for measuring the relative use of the two upper-limbs in patients with hemiparesis. We made use of the gross movement (GM) score developed by Luenberger et al.. We observed that the GM score has only fair accuracy in detecting upper-limb use. We also presented methods for visualizing relative upper-limb use, and a method for quantifying asymmetry in use.
We organized the first edition of NeuroRehack – an international Summer/Winter school and Hackathon in Neurorehabilitation Engineering. We had great response from students from across the world in spite of very little advertisement of the event. We had a great line-up of fantastic speakers from the field who helped introduce the undergrdatue and graduate students to the field’s fundamentals and state-of-the-art.
A team from the University of Queensland and one from Christian Medical College Vellore were joint winners of the hackathon.
Monisha Yuvaraj, a PhD student in the group has received the Prime Minister’s Research Fellowship for her proposed PhD thesis on EMG-triggered robot assisted therapy. She will be exploring appropriate methods for EMG triggered robot assisted therapy and evaluating its efficacy in severely affected stroke patients as part of doctoral research.
Extending our previous work on movement smoothness, we investigated whether existing methods such as spectral arclength (SPARC) and Log dimensionless jerk (LDLJ) can be used with data from an IMU. After 5 years of exploring different approaches, we propose a modified version of the LDLJ measure to work directly with accelerometer data. This work demonstrates that movements of the reference frame will confound movement smoothness.
Our collaborative project with Dr. Christian Antfolk’s group at Lund University has been approved. This project will extend out work on upper-limb functioning assessment using wearable sensors by bringing cutting-edge AI/ML algorithms for improved accuracy of detection of upper-limb use and tasks during daily living. The next three years are going to be exciting!!!!