Abu Dhabi: With stroke victims often having to deal with physical side-effects like muscle weakness and paralysis that affects their daily functions, a UAE University professor is in the process of developing a smart suit that will reestablish the links between the brain and the muscles to help with the rehabilitation process.
“The idea is to understand how our brain is controlling our muscles, after a stroke the brain loses the best way of communicating with the muscles, which causes paralysis, so we need to teach the brain again to communicate with these muscles,” said Fady Al Najjar, assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering at UAEU, and the developer behind the smart suit.
Explaining how the smart suit will work to regain the brain and muscle functions, Al Najjar said that a high-tech sensor would be placed on the arm that is still functioning normally, with the recorded signals then transferred to the affected arm.
“Let’s say that the person had a stroke in his left arm and he still has normal movement on his right arm; if I were to ask that person to move his right arm, his brain would pick the correct muscle patterns to move that arm. So, once that happens, our sensors will record these patterns from the right arm and mimic similar patterns and send them to the arm affected by the stroke through vibrations,” he said.
“By doing this we can speed up the recovery process. The original muscle patterns are always stored in the intact side, we just need it to lead the training in the affected side,” he added.
Al Najjar said that no such technology is currently available on the market to help with the stroke rehabilitation process, pointing to the untapped potential of the smart suit.
“Reading muscle patterns and highlighting motor skills is an area that I have worked on before; what’s new here with this work is how to use the motor skill information to recall the healthy patterns from the brain to the muscles by using vibrations. No such technology is currently available on the market for such work.
“The smart suit will be very beneficial because we are not using another person’s brain patterns and signals; the sensors are studying and recording the brain signals of the affected person himself and then transfering it to the arm that has lost its normal functions,” he added.
Al Najjar said he is still working on finalising the smart suit, but noted that doctors in the UAE were positive about his project.
“Doctors in the UAE have so far been receptive to the smart suit and, at the moment, I am looking to get the approval of the ethics committee before partnering with Al Ain Hospital on a pilot test with patients.
“I still have to work on simplifying the smart suit and making it easy to work as well as cost-efficient,” he added.
