App Description

Recovery of hand and arm function is the highest priority for individuals with tetraplegia following spinal cord injury (SCI). Evidence suggests that therapist-delivered motor training can improve motor function in SCI, greater than spontaneous recovery alone. In addition, it has been reported that electromyography (EMG) feedback based training increases corticomotor excitability. However there is no independently applied and inexpensive training modality that enables the patient to continue EMG biofeedback based motor training at home between visits to the clinic.

This project aims at developing new training software platform ‘CoTrain’ that works in combination with existing portable hardware to create a device which can be taken home by patients to increase training time between visits. It will also allow the therapist to track their patient’s progress over a period of time.

The prototype software currently runs in Matlab and has been tested so far to give a consistent similarity index score at the end of each recording.

Platform

Matlab
Thalmic LabsMyoBand
MS Windows laptop

Development Team

Somu Ray
Barry McKay
Brad Farrell

The Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center for Information and Communications Technology Access (LiveWell RERC) is funded by a 5-year grant from the National Institute on Disability, Independent Living and Rehabilitation Research in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (grant number 90RE5028). The opinions contained in this website are those of the LiveWell RERC and do not necessarily reflect those of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services or NIDILRR.