SBIR Phase I: A Novel Bimanual Upper-body Exoskeleton for Stroke Therapy

The broader impact/commercial potential of this project is that the project addresses one of the most critical and challenging problems in stroke rehabilitation - shoulder and arm rehabilitation. More than 800,000 people suffer from a stroke per year in the US and most of them are left with arm and shoulder impairments. This robotic invention has the potential to deliver revolutionary benefits to these stroke survivors, including better recovery outcomes and shorter length of hospital stay. Indirectly, the innovation will improve vocational skills and prevent consequential safety accidents after a stroke. The major outcomes of this work has the potential to improve the rehabilitation outcomes of not only stroke patients but also those with upper extremity neurological and musculoskeletal impairments. The project will create a unique opportunity for exposing the PI and researchers to the process of translating basic research into deployed technology. This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will validate the capability of the proposed rehabilitation robot technology for correcting abnormal coordination of the shoulder complex after stroke. Although rehabilitation hospitals have long sought a technological innovation that will lead to a higher clinical efficacy than conventional care, there is no robotic intervention commercially available that fully addresses the shoulder rehabilitation problem. The PI and collaborators will validate the proposed design and controller with experiments with human subjects. The planned experiments will confirm the proposed robot technology that addresses the abnormal shoulder coordination problem, which is critical for the shoulder rehabilitation after stroke. In addition, PI and collaborators will define and develop a minimum viable product (MVP) of the proposed innovation which will confirm the product-market fit.