Abstract:
There are more than eighty million people in the world who are paralyzed and forced to live their lives miserably. In more than seventy percent of the cases, the causes are spinal cord injury, stroke and peripheral nerve injury. The aim of this project is to make a device that would enable these seventy percent paralyzed patients to move their upper extremity (arm and hand). In this project, we are combining Functional Electrical Stimulation (FES) with voice recognition to restore limited functionality to the arms and hands. In FES, electric pulses are being provided to the specific muscles via electrodes to stimulate them externally and enabling them to produce contractions. These contractions are used to perform functions like grasping etc. The voice-controlled FES system consists of an Android application, Bluetooth module and a microcontroller to control the FES device. The mobile application allows the patient to use voice commands to execute a predefined motion pattern. The application processes the user's voice input and communicates with the microcontroller accordingly via Bluetooth enabling the FES device to executive the desired motion.
It was observed that movements like finger and wrist flexion, pronation, elbow extension and power grasp can be done using this device. The device also prevents muscle atrophy keeping the muscles of the part affected with paralysis from decay due to loss of sensation and immobility. Moreover, it causes rehabilitation along with providing functionality to the affected parts. It also reduces muscle atrophy cause by absence of muscle activity. Currently, the focus is on the arm and hand of the affected but the system can be extended to assist other affected parts of the paralyzed patients like legs.
