STAR-eX: A Student-Teacher Assistive Rehabilitation Exoskeleton for Post-Stroke Mirror Therapy Hand Hemiplegia

Traditional Mirror Therapy (MT) uses the reflection of an unaffected limb to promote neural recovery in the affected limb post-stroke. Robotic Mirror Therapy (RMT) has since emerged with robotics development, but current devices are often unsuitable for Point-Of-Care (POC) due to their cost, complexity, and lack of user-friendliness. To address these issues, we developed a portable, affordable, and user-friendly hand-finger rehabilitation system integrating a 21-Degree-Of-Freedom (DoF) parallel manipulator (5 active DoF), a motion sensor, and a Virtual Reality (VR) piano task. The VR tasks, inspired by RMT, Robotic Therapy (RT), and MT, leverage Discrete Sequence Progress Tasks (DSPTs) to engage brain regions responsible for sequential actions, critical for Activities of Daily Living (ADL). Operating in a student-teacher configuration, the system mirrors movements of the unaffected hand onto the affected hand, forming a neurological loop. In preliminary tests with 16 healthy participants, our system demonstrated increased motor skill acquisition compared to RT.