Effects of searching task on spinal cord excitability for finger function recovery training with robotic device

There is an increasing need for patients affected by cerebrovascular diseases to receive continuous and proper rehabilitation support in his/her home. To this end, many robotic rehabilitation support devices for finger therapy have been proposed. However, there has been no consideration for treatment of "fingertips" with these finger therapy support devices. An active touch uses fingertip to discriminate the object in touch. It uses both sensational and motor control nerve systems. Therefore, there is a possibility that the active touch will improve the activities of a spinal cord, and therefore contribute to improve the effectiveness of a finger rehabilitation. A new robotic device that includes the active touch task with finger movements will provide an ideal home rehabilitation device. In this paper, we show that an active touch for pattern discrimination task will improve the activities of spinal cord. The measurement was performed by using F-waves and M-waves given by the evoked-EMG signals applied to healthy subjects. By the experiments, it was shown that the activity is significantly high for the cases of performing active touch tasks. We would like to utilize the results of this study for an exploitation of a robotic finger functional treatment machine used at home.