By Briana Vannozzi
Correspondent
When Muriel Tucker first came to the team of rehab therapists at St. Joe’s Hospital in Wayne she had her doubts about recovery from her stroke.
“My speech was not good, my arm, couldn’t move. My legs. I couldn’t do anything,” she said.
“The thing that makes the virtual rehabilitation and robotics really powerful is that we can really tailor the difficulty of the activity to exactly what the patient is capable of,” said Dr. Gerry Fluet.
Fluet is a physical therapist in the Acute Rehab Department. In this program, he’s worked with about 25 patients who have suffered debilitating losses from the brain damage caused by stroke.
“Our hope is that our patients are going to be able to use their arms and their hands well enough that they’ll be able to return to the rolls they were filling prior to the stroke. It’s not necessarily just to be able to move around and be independent, but to go back to work,” Fluet said.
They use robotic arms and cybergloves called haptics, paid for with the help of a grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Patients spend an hour a day for 10 sessions rewiring the neuropathways in their brain.
“So if we’re playing with cups, we can change the weight of the cups, we can play around with the height of the shelves, we can change all of this,” said Fluet.
The exercises are so effective because they’re linked to meaningful tasks. So hitting a piano key for example provides instant auditory and visual feedback.
“It’s a much more effective stimuli for brain recovery to perform a meaningful task than it would be to wiggle your fingers a few inches,” Fluet said.
“If we can decrease the burden of care on the family members or caregiver, we have decreased the health care dollars that are needed for patients who suffer from strokes,” said St. Joe’s Hospital Acute Rehab Center Medical Director Dr. Supriya Massood.
Massood says because strokes are the third leading cause of nursing home placements. That won’t be the case for Muriel.
When asked what she is now able to do at home because of this rehab, she said, “Put my clothes on, put my shirt on, wash my face. I couldn’t do nothing before.”
The large team of researchers in collaboration with NJIT and Rutgers, say now they’re studying if it’s most effective to work with patients immediately following the brain trauma or weeks and months out. And they’ll be looking at exactly which parts of the brain are stimulated when it’s signaled to make movements. So far the results are speaking for themselves, not bad they say — for a video game.