Redesign of a minimally-supervised portable hand trainer for upper limb rehabilitation after stroke

Redesign of a minimally-supervised portable hand trainer for upper limb rehabilitation after stroke

van der Stoep, Eline (TU Delft Industrial Design Engineering; TU Delft Human-Centered Design)

Goossens, R.H.M. (mentor)
Marchal Crespo, L. (mentor)

Delft University of Technology

Delft University of Technology

Integrated Product Design | Medisign

2023-07-28

People that are recovering from a stroke need frequent and high-intensity training to regain their upper-limb capacity. This will eventually result in better performances and higher quality of their daily life. Robotic devices are often used to assist stroke patients in rehabilitation. The minimally-supervised portable hand trainer, which is currently developed at the Motor Learning and Neurorehabilitation Lab of the TU Delft, specifically focuses on hand and forearm rehabilitation. Haptic feedback is used in a virtual game to train patients' finger flexion and extension and forearm pronosupination.
Prior to this master thesis, a feasibility and usability study has been performed with the second iteration of the hand trainer in collaboration with therapists from Rijndam and healthy participants, showing room for improvement.

In this graduation project, the portable hand trainer is redesigned to develop an improved product design in comparison to the second iteration. Following a human-centered design approach, a modified version of the double diamond method was created to achieve a redesign that enables more functional, ergonomic, and motivating rehabilitation training.

Analysis on strokes, on rehabilitation, on the state-of-the-art, through peer tests, and on the usability study, were performed to create a decision matrix to define a list of potential improvements, distinguishing high-priority, medium-priority and low-priority improvements.
The high-priority improvements have been thoroughly addressed in multiple cycles of ideation-, developing- and validating activities. The results are combined and transformed into a hardware-ready 3D prototype that demonstrates improvement in the pronosupination movement, the donning and doffing of the device and the wrist support. The prototype of the third iteration of the portable hand trainer is evaluated through interviews with experts in the field to reflect on the project goal and propose recommendations on future work.
The medium-priority improvements have been addressed in one cycle of ideation activities of which the results are presented in sketches to advice on further development.
The low-priority improvements have not been addressed in this project.

Upper limb rehabilitation
Stroke
Haptic feedback
Portable
Hand trainer
Human-centered design
virtual game

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:951d09db-efdd-43b4-bc14-a467b22d96aa

Student theses

master thesis

© 2023 Eline van der Stoep