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30/07/2015

VHIR and Vodafone will develop an app for tablets addressed to patients who have suffered stroke

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30/07/2015

VHIR and Vodafone will develop an app for tablets addressed to patients who have suffered stroke

Vall d'Hebron Institute of Research (VHIR), Vall d'Hebron University Hospital (HUVH) and Vodafone Spain Foundation have signed a collaboration agreement to develop and test an application in patients to improve mobility after suffering a stroke. The application provides access to a supervised rehabilitation program through any tablet device.The new system allows to do and record any movement. "With electronic tablet patients besides practicing arm movements, can exercise hands, legs and even speech mobility", says Dr. Marc Ribó, responsible of the scientist project, member of their Neurovascular Disease group at VHIR and member of the Stroke Unit at HUVH. The aim of the project is to complement and do maintenance rehabilitation training from home for patients who have had a stroke and learned how to do it in the hospital. In any case the aim is to replace treatment in person. For patients it is essential to continue with these exercises, because if they don't keep the maintenance, may lose movements that have achieved during treatment.To carry out the project, Vodafone Spain Foundation has developed a platform called Mefacilyta, offering a collaborative web environment for the generation of personalized multimedia content, and uses technologies such as augmented reality and QR codes. Vall d'Hebron professionals will post on this platform near a hundred videos with rehabilitation exercises. Patients according to their functional status, have to make every day exercises scheduled by their therapist and record them with the same tablet. Thus, the therapist can track patients and send corrections or recommendations, either by text message via the application or by phone.In this moment, the application is still under configuration, and will start from October to be tested in 50 patients. In this project are involved the Neurovascular Disease group at VHIR and Stroke Unit at HUVH, connected by Dr. Ribo, and the Rehabilitation Service at HUVH, led by doctors Inma Bori and Susanna Rodriguez. The Vodafone Spain Foundation provides the technology and knowledge to clinical practice moving the digital environment, and provides 45,000 euros to make this possible.In March 2012, VHIR and Vodafone signed the first agreement to study the impact of an integrated telemedicine system at home, in terms of functional recovery, medical control, satisfaction and costs, which would allow to design and promote new strategies for treatment after stroke. That was the beginning of Global Tele Rehabilitation System (GTRS).The results of this first experience project, explains Dr. Bori, were very satisfactory. "We proved that patients who did rehabilitation exercises of arms with GTRS system from home during 4 weeks showed an improvement in motor function of these tips". The patients highly appreciated the tool, and often regretted not being able to have the system longer.The limitation of this system was that the patients needed a touch screen computer and a console Microsoft Kinect that only detected some types of movements. Now, building on the success of this project, the Vodafone Spain Foundation and Vall d'Hebron seek to prove with Mefacilyta platform a more sustainable and scalable solution that can be accessible to most patients and volunteers to detect movements over all the body.

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