Touch Trainer

Background:

Currently, the Center for Disease Control reports that someone in the United States has a stroke every 40 seconds, resulting in approximately 790,000 people having a stroke every year. Patients after suffering from a stroke lose somatosensation in one of their hands. The loss of somatosensation weakens the sense of touch (tactile sensation). The purpose of ReTouch is to create a device that assists post-stroke patients to regain their sense of touch. The device contains two modules, where one module moves the patients’ index, middle, and ring fingers on their paralyzed hand and the other contains buttons allowing them to use their healthy hand to press and match the fingers that are being pushed. The device additionally contains a musical game corresponding to activity done on the modules to improve patients’ sense of touch over time. 

Goal and Objectives:

The overarching goal of the project is to create an engaging rehabilitation device to help post-stroke patients retain a sense of touch.

In fall quarter, our team designed and created our code in Python to operate the Touch Trainer. Our team was  able have a Raspberry Pi gamify the rehabilitation process to a rhythm game. Our program moves one random actuator to a specific BPM and the patient responses by pressing onto corresponding button to continue the program/game. 

For the winter quarter, the focus will be on user interface. The first milestone of the winter quarter is to interface the game algorithm that was completed by the end of fall quarter with a screen. The screen will display instructions of the game to the users and allow them to see their progress. The second milestone for the quarter would be to create an algorithm that assesses the users’ performance, based on their response time, to adjust the level of difficulty to the game. The final milestone of the quarter is to improve the casing design that holds the buttons and actuators. 

Team Contact(s):

Huy Ho: huyth@uci.edu​

Advisor:

Dr.David  Reinkensmeyer      dreinken@uci.edu                        

Dylan Reinsdorf     dreinsdo@uci.edu