Investigation of controllable multi electrode based FES (functional electrical stimulation) system for restoration of grasp-preliminary study on healthy individuals
Functional electrical stimulation applied via
surface electrode can be used for hand rehabilitation
particularly for enabling grasp in patients with stroke or spinal
cord injury. The use of multi-pad electrode and multi-channel
electrical stimulator based improve the effectiveness of
conventional FES. Such a system consists of a multi-pad
surface electrode and a matching multi-channel stimulator.
This system will allow the targeting of motor neurons which
activate muscle groups to produce corresponding functional
movements of the hand. This paper presents our study on
normal subjects to quantify the movement resulting from
stimulation of electrodes spatially distributed around the
forearm. The device was tested on four healthy subjects and
the results show that multi-pad electrode provide desired
amount of selectivity and can be used for generating functional
grasp. The results also show that the effect of stimulation
varies from person to person reflecting inters subject
anatomical variability