Made to measure

Sean Polischuk is still coping with the aftermath of a stroke he had in early February.

His right side has been numb, his attention wanders and he must use the utmost concentration to move his fingers, toes and ankles.

The 21-year-old university student is facing months of rehabilitation at Foothills Medical Centre, where a $140,000 robot has been helping an Alberta Health Services doctor determine the complete and precise impact of Polischuk’s stroke. 

Dr. Sean Dukelow says strokes are usually measured by observing patients doing different tasks and noting their sensory, motor and cognitive skills. “At the end of the day,” he says, “a clinician determines a patient’s score in a very subjective way.”

Dukelow has been researching objective stroke assessments for several years. This past summer, he began using an exoskeleton robot at the Foothills Medical Centre to quantify a stroke’s effect on a person’s ability to see, move, sense, think, talk and hear.

The robot, called the KINARM (kinesiologic instrument for normal and altered reaching movements), measures these skills and determines any ‘deficits.’

Patients are connected, sitting down, to the robot and then asked to copy motions or touch targets shown on a display. The robot provides support or resistance to their movements, compares these movements to normal responses, and identifies the differences.

 “What we find is that the robot is more sensitive in picking up the deficits in terms of movement and we hope this will give us new insight into developing treatments,” says Dukelow, who is also an assistant professor in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Calgary and a member of the faculty’s Hotchkiss Brain Institute.

Knowing the full effects of a stroke plays a significant role in patients’ recovery and what they can do in their daily life. Dukelow says KINARM identifies deficits in a few minutes that are sometimes difficult to pick up even after multiple standard clinical exams.

Polischuk feels he’s being well-tested during his KINARM sessions.

“The robot triggers your brain and makes you think quite a bit more about what you’re doing,” says Polischuk. “It also makes the testing more fun.”

Dukelow believes KINARM could soon be used to tailor rehabilitation programs for each patient and give individuals such as Polischuk their best chance of recovery.

About 5,000 Albertans have a stroke every year.

Strokes occur when the flow of blood to the brain is interrupted, or when blood vessels in the brain rupture, causing brain cells in the affected area to die.