How To Transition Into At-Home Stroke Rehab: Improving Coordination & Precision Motor Function
With Dr. Nick Housley 18th Aug, 21Article
Patients may experience impaired motor function after a stroke, which will affect their mobility and ability to carry out daily tasks. Rehabilitation training is one of the best and most effective ways to improve motor impairments in stroke survivors.
Transitioning From Inpatient Rehab To At Home Stroke Rehab
The transition from a dedicated intervention in the
inpatient setting to a home environment is a steep drop-off.
Although the transition between inpatient rehab (where there is a
lot of support staff, physical therapists, and speech therapists who
can help) and stroke rehab at home can be challenging, Motus
Hand can be helpful in this transition period.
However, not everyone can qualify for a stroke rehab at home
after a stroke. But the patient’s qualification for stroke rehab
at home depends on his functional mobility and volitional activation
status and is likely to be authorized by the doctor.
Regaining Coordination And Motor Control
Stroke survivors suffer from awareness and coordination challenges and
difficulty in performing motor functions. It can be
effective to practice fine motor activities after stroke
to regain movement and upper-extremity performance. The motor
activities include shuffling cards, playing board games,
using rubber bands, tabletop exercises, etc.
Motor skills that can be challenging for a stroke
survivor are fundamental to a constraint program such as
Constrained Induced Movement Therapy (CIMT). CIMT is a
classic gold standard approach to improving motor function
and regaining coordination. It makes the patient more
aware of that affected limb because it forces them to
use the affected side of the body to complete tasks.
Improving Precision Motor Function
To improve precision motor functions, you can integrate visual information at appropriate times because timing matters. The robotics system of Motus Hand imposes temporal constraints on you to help you begin to reorient and integrate those multimodal systems like your vision as well as the somatosensory system in your motor functions.
The Best Timing To Do Stroke Rehab
Intense rehabilitation is not advantageous immediately
after a stroke. It is appropriate to start layering more
intense rehab programs after a week or ten days of stroke.
That is underlying neurophysiology. You have to layer on the
administrative constraints of what is appropriate for the
inpatient settings.
There was a randomized control trial conducted by Dr.
Steve Wolf called the vectors trial. They investigated early
repetitive task practice and found that stroke rehabilitation
during the first few days, especially the first six days,
actually has an adverse effect, so it is best to delay it
until after hemodynamic stability. In general, make sure that
there is no active bleeding or inflammatory marks on the patients.
After around ten days, the rehabilitation is appropriate,
providing the patients received the dosage correctly.
The patient does not want to jump right into six hours of
rehab a day, and it would also be inappropriate. You should
build the repetitive task practice slowly and be rational about it.
Conclusion
To conclude, we can say that the stroke rehabilitation process should start after 7-10 days of stroke. The stroke survivors can transfer from inpatient rehab to stroke rehab at home facility. But they would still have to do repetitive tasks practice and constrained induced movement therapy at home to regain motor function.