07_Third Independent Meeting (event date: 6/9/15)

Our BME group (Devin, Patrick, Chris, and I) meet at 8:00pm to address some of the feedback Dr. Wells gave us about our project topic. Devin mentioned our project idea to Dr. Wells, and Dr. Wells suggested that we verify the usefulness of a hypertonia combatting device to the stroke victim population.

Upon reading through medical research on the topic of stroke recovery and hypertonia issues, we found that of the 15 million stroke victims/year, 10 million survive and of those ~77-81% experience decreased extremity motor control leading to 66% of those having immobilized extremities after 6 months post-stroke. This immobilization is caused by complete loss of motor control resulting in muscle tightening and contraction. However, many victims who retain motor control during the first 6 months still lose extremity control due to the inability to overcome the partial resistance caused by temporary muscle contraction. With assistance, patients can overcome this temporary resistance and regain muscle flexibility along with extremity control. These patients are among the approx. 5 million who experience immobilized extremities after six months of undergoing a stroke.

We concluded that this was a significant problem among stroke victims and that reducing the hypertonia in stroke victim extremities could reduce the percentage of initial-paralysis stroke victims who end up never recovering control over their affected extremities.

We also wanted to verify the uniqueness of our proposed device by (a) looking for similar devices, (b) comparing the price of known devices, and (c) identifying improvements/dissimilarities between those and our idea.

We found a range of hand-hypertonia combatting devices ranging from cheap passive devices at $10 to expensive active machines at several thousand dollars. The cheapest active device we identified was ~$1000; we set our proposed active-device to cost less than $1000.