May 15, 2014 –
Zondervan (left) and Friedman are rethinking traditional approaches to stroke therapy. (Photos: Steve Zylius)
One wouldn’t expect the leaders of a company specializing in products for stroke patients to be in their mid-20s. But youth is clearly the genius behind Flint Rehabilitation Devices, a startup company headquartered in TechPortal, the CALIT2 technology business incubator.
Nizan Friedman and Danny Zondervan, both recent doctoral graduates of UC Irvine’s Samueli School of Engineering, admit that a few years ago, they didn’t think a whole lot about the 795,000 Americans, mostly older adults, who suffer a stroke each year. But their engineering skills — Friedman in biomedical and Zondervan in mechanical — and their Millennial-generation love of the video games Guitar Hero and Rock Band have placed the duo in the unlikely position of rethinking the traditional approach to stroke rehabilitation.
By summer of this year, their company will launch its first product, the Music Glove, a device designed to help stroke patients with hand paralysis regain function. The device can be used at home or in a clinic to augment traditional physical therapy.
Friedman hit upon the idea while working on a hand robot under the auspices of engineering professors Mark Bachman, director of the eHealth Collaboratory, and David Reinkensmeyer. Bachman urged Friedman to design something simpler than the highly complex robots many researchers were working on. A later discussion between Friedman and Bachman – both musicians, as is Zondervan – sparked the idea of adding music to the device.
“We tried it out and it worked really well to help people recover hand function after a stroke,” recalls Friedman, the company’s president. “It just seemed to click.”
The device is a glove with sensors on the fingertips that works with a dedicated game console or a touch-screen tablet device. Much in the same way that someone playing Guitar Hero hits buttons on a guitar to sync with notes on the screen, the Music Glove wearer taps notes with his fingertips and thumb to the beat of a song. Playing the game prompts the neural connections between the hand and brain to recover.
“The reason our software is inspired by Guitar Hero is because people get addicted to the game,” Friedman says. “We want people to get addicted to therapy. Anything that can motivate people to do therapy for a long time is the right way to go.”
The Music Glove went through many iterations, however. Reinkensmeyer provided valuable insights into the field of rehabilitation and the pitfalls of trying to build highly complex, expensive robots.
“Simple devices have a better chance of actually being used by people, especially in the home environment,” Reinkensmeyer says.
MusicGlove is inspired by “Guitar Hero.”
Eventually, Friedman and Zondervan launched clinical trials of the product in the eHealth Collaboratory. The study participants, who were more than six months out from having a stroke resulting in disability, used the device for two weeks. Their progress on timed tests – such as moving a pile of blocks in 60 seconds – was compared to a two-week period in which they performed standard physical therapy.
The study demonstrated that the Music Glove produced a threefold improvement in function compared to traditional therapy. Better yet, says Zondervan: “People just seemed to love it.”
Janet Johnson, 59, entered the clinical trial after suffering a severe stroke that caused right-side paralysis. Physical therapy helped her learn to walk again, but her right hand remained stubbornly and severely affected until she began using the glove.
“I really fell in love with it,” says the Los Angeles woman. “You hit the key you want to hit without thinking about it. You get in the flow. You just groove along to the song, and the next thing you know, you’ve hit every note.”
After using the device for three months, Johnson found she could once again type efficiently and use the television remote with her right hand.
The key to a successful rehabilitation product is to integrate the human experience with technology, Bachman says. “Innovation is about designing something human beings will use that makes them feel good and is helpful.”
Friedman and Zondervan learned some of their early prototypes were too complicated for some stroke patients. After all, most stroke patients are not of the Guitar Hero generation.
“We found that when you bring a rehabilitation device home, it needs to be dirt simple,” Friedman says. “If there’s anything as difficult as double-clicking an icon, that’s too hard. It needs to be as simple and intuitive as possible; otherwise it just won’t be used.”
If easy to operate, however, the Music Glove actually inspires people to work harder, Friedman says.
“The glove motivates high-intensity movement,” he explains. “People have to complete their movement in order to play the game. If they try to move their finger a little bit but don’t complete that movement they won’t be able to play the game. That motivates them. It’s also very repetitive. People are doing thousands of movements per hour.”
Studies show music can induce cortical reorganization in the brain and help to reorganize it after a stroke. But the device also encourages active learning. Patients receive immediate feedback on their “scores” from the display on the game console after completing the song.
“We make sure you know if you were successful or not because if you weren’t, you need to correct something,” says Zondervan, the company’s chief technical officer.
After receiving several Small Business Innovation Research Grants from the National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research to develop the product, the pair earned a $1.5 million grant in January that allowed them to proceed with product manufacturing.
“This has been a cool blend of the science, the practicality of designing a product and then having to figure out the commercial side,” Zondervan notes. “But ultimately, what inspires us the most is the hope that this device will improve the lives of the people who use it.”
— Shari Roan
