Rehabilitation treatment can be expected to restore some function. Rehabilitation treatment methods vary according to the recovery status of each individual patient. It is estimated that there are about 1.1 million stroke patients in Japan. There are about 190,000 physical therapists and about 90,000 occupational therapists involved in rehabilitation. Current recovery training generally involves therapists holding the patient’s hands and bending and stretching them. This method means that there is a shortage of physical therapists and occupational therapists compared to the number of patients. Currently, there is a shortage of physical therapists and occupational therapists. There is a growing momentum to overcome this shortage with rehabilitation robots.
There seems to be a misunderstanding that only physical therapy, occupational therapy, and speech-language-hearing therapy are “rehabilitation.” This misunderstanding is the idea that rehabilitation should only aim for functional recovery. Rehabilitation is not limited to simply physical disabilities. The global trend is not just to restore function, but to restore a person’s entire life. Furthermore, rehabilitation is carried out through collaboration between the patient, medical professionals, and sometimes family members. Rehabilitation is carried out with consideration for the patient’s psychology and intentions, and a program that will develop the patient’s strengths is proposed. Rehabilitation programs that ignore the patient are no longer valued.
One company was one of the first to grasp this trend and develop a rehabilitation robot. Tohoku Medical Engineering (Morioka City), a medical device manufacturer, developed a rehabilitation robot that can train patients to recover function. This company’s strategy was focused on lifestyle. The global trend for rehabilitation robots was that they were often aimed at the lower limbs (feet and legs). Patient mobility (walking independently, using a chair) was given priority, and hand and finger functions tended to be put on the back burner. However, if you think about it, in real life, we often use our hands to do things like eat and write. Tohoku Medical Engineering focused on rehabilitation of the hands and fingers. The patient places both hands in the device and grasps the grips inside the device with each hand. The robot repeats the action of catching flying objects displayed on the screen with the hand on the screen at the right time. It is a great way to continue training while having fun by catching flying objects with the hand on the screen at the right time. This robot is designed so that the patient can train autonomously.
