According to the American College of Sports Medicine, wearable technologies are the worlds current number one fitness trend (Thompson, 2015, 2016). By providing patients with an instant biofeedback, wearables not only have the possibility to prevent injury and overuse, but also to optimize training (Düking, Holmberg, & Sperlich, 2017) which becomes of special interest in rehabilitation where exercising optimally is paramount for your health. We gathered what applications are there for increasing a patient’s rehabilitation process. The companies introduced below will exhibit at the upcoming WT | Wearable Technologies Show 2017 MEDICA on November 13-16, 2017 in Düsseldorf.
More than 50 million people are estimated in Europe, North America and Japan to suffer from a weak hand due to illness, injury, stroke or old age. The Swedish company Bioservo Technologies aims to give them a helping hand with their SEM Glove™. Thanks to state-of-the-art robotic SEM™ technology they have endless possibilities to support people with a weakened grip to get new strength and endurance in their hands and to prevent strain injuries.
Empowering physiotherapy, Luna EMG by EGZOTech is a multi-functional upper and lower limb rehabilitation robot for neurological and orthopedic patients. It can perform force or EMG driven active movement exercises with severely atrophied patients for example after a stroke, with muscular dystrophy or MS. Luna uses isolating extensions to train single joints or functional and dynamic ones to exercise whole limbs in real life patterns, extensions can be swapped within 10 seconds to quickly move the patient through training sessions and enable a faster recovery time.