This product is a hand rehabilitation system for patients suffering from RSD, stroke, arthritis, or similar conditions which render one hand impaired while the other remains healthy. Through repetitive flexion and extension movements, the apparatus enables each patient to use their healthy hand to exercise their impaired hand. To maximize usability, the two-part system can be reconfigured to accommodate an impaired left or right hand. A series of custom designed neoprene gloves allow the patient to choose between targeting the hand or wrist joints during exercises. Using a torque sensor, the patient’s efforts are tracked and displayed in real time.

Radlab was commissioned by Dr. Moacir Schnapp and Dr. Kit Mays to build on their knowledge of pain and rehabilitation as it pertains to debilitating hand conditions. Dr. Mays and Dr. Schnapp had already patented a “Rehabilitative Apparatus for Treating Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy” in 2000 (patent no. 6,149,612). Their original flywheel system was limited in that, due to its purely mechanical nature, it had no way of readily specifying particular exercise regimens or capturing a patient’s efforts, which therefore created roadblocks in discerning the system’s efficacy. Our task was to couple their medical knowledge with innovative design, fabrication, and technology solutions.

It was our stance that this was a perfect project for bringing together skill sets and lessons learned from architecture, industrial design, and engineering. Radlab is a firm that strives to implement interdisciplinary design as applied research, and the scope of this project fit well within our pattern of practice. It was our aim to focus on addressing four key concerns in a cohesive, systematic manner: pain sensitivity, arm stability, hand safety, and intuitive usability. Within each of these categories it was our underlying drive to create a clear, elegant solution. Taking to heart the reality that transparency itself has no intrinsic value, it was our intention to utilitize techniques of transparency as a way of framing fuctionality.

As part of our effort to create a comfortable, mediating bridge between the rigidity of the mechanical parts and the flexibility of the hand, we created soft, neoprene gloves. In order to maximize the stability of the arm during rehab sessions, we used cast urethane forearm pads and polyester wrist straps. The bright yellow nylon tabs were designed into the glove straps for easily accessible emergency release. With respect to the use of the devices and the software which runs them, it was our intention to rely primarily on geometry, material, color and texture, to build an intuitive user experience.

Our research for this project was ongoing throughout all phases. We consulted with a variety of experts, including our client(s), an anesthesiologist and a neurologist; mechanical, electrical, and software engineers; a biomedical engineer/computational neuroscientist; a fashion designer and seamster. For this product it was particularly important to our client that the rehabilitation system was as transparent in possible, both aesthetically and ergonomically. This interest in transparency guided our material choices, and the manner in which the materials were used, placed, formed, and informed. Our collective goal was to create an apparatus that was robust, comfortable, accessible, informative, and stimulating to a wide gamut of potential users. Using a variety of digital techniques, from parametric modeling to computer numerically controlled fabrication, we were able to test, prototype, and iterate through a wide range of materials, forms, and assemblies.

One of the primary reasons this new rehab apparatus has been successful in clinical trials is because it senses, records, displays, and archives a wealth of data at a high resolution. On the one hand, patients and therapists get immediate numeric feedback about the details of every exercise regimen, including speed and range of motion for each cycle (full flexion + full extension). On the other hand, the software that regulates and collects data from the device stores the graphs from each exercise regimen. From this archive of graphs, therapists are able to study patient histories and make educated predictions about patient trajectories. So far there have been many patients who have used the rehabilitation system, and the reports indicate that they are achieving increases in speed of flexion and extension as well as increases in range of motion.