The AnkleTutor™ is a safe comfortable ankle brace that evaluates and treats extension/ flexion of the ankle and supination/ pronation of the forefoot. The AnkleTutor™ comes in four sizes for the right and left sides. Each brace has position and speed sensors and are used together with specialized rehabilitation software package to provide an active exercise based lower extremity rehabilitation program that uses the accepted methods of impairment orientated training (IOT) with augmented feedback. The AnkleTutor™ is a biofeedback system gives Physiotherapists, and other Physical therapists access to an affordable user friendly lower extremity ankle rehabilitation package.
- Stroke
- Head injuries
- Spinal cord Injury
- Cerebral Palsy
- Multiple Sclerosis
- Drop Foot
- Ankle surgery rehabilitation
- Ankle muscle weakness
- Parkinson's disease
- Lumbar Plexus nerve injury
- Ankle fractures or soft tissue injuries
- Tibial and Peroneal nerve injuries
With the AnkleTutor™ Meditouch™ has developed a system that builds on the proven rehabilitation concept of Impairment Orientated Training (IOT) with augmented or extrinsic feedback. This allows for repetitive active exercise training together with biofeedback. The brace evaluates and treats Dorsal and Plantar flexion of the ankle and supination/ pronation of the forefoot. Physiotherapists or Physical therapists can tailor challenging exercises to the patient's lower extremity impairment such as range of motion, accuracy and speed of movement. The system provides both concurrent and terminal quantitative and qualitative extrinsic feedback and has proven effective when combined with traditional ankle and forefoot rehabilitation treatments and therapy.
The program allows the clinician to firstly evaluate the patient's ankle and forefoot impairment. This information is saved and documented so that an objective continuous report of patient progress is always available. This allows reports to be given to other rehabilitation specialists to ensure that the patient's treatment schedule is optimized to therefore ensuring better treatment outcome. The clinician can then choose and customize the rehabilitation exercise tasks and their level of difficulty to the patient's specific impairment. The exercise tasks are presented to the patient in the form of challenging games. For example the game "Track" can be chosen to work on range of motion, accuracy and speed of movement. The level of game difficulty can be adjusted either by the clinician or automatically controlled by the computer as the patients exercise performance leads to an improvement in their impairment and kinematics parameters.
The games give the patient motion, visual and auditory biofeedback. This teaches the patient to understand, plan and direct ankle movements to perform the required exercise. This qualitative feedback is known as extrinsic or augmented feedback and provides both knowledge of results and knowledge of performance. The package has been designed to ensure that the patient remains challenged and motivated. All the exercises can be performed at different difficulty levels that can be customized to the patient's lower limb impairment and movement ability. The exercise tasks have been developed to include a wide range of different levels of patient motor, sensory and cognitive function ability. This means that the patient is always able to interact with the games. In addition the level of exercise difficulty can be adjusted either by the clinician or automatically by the software. The patient's motivation to improve on their ankle and lower limb exercise performance is further increased as an overall performance score is included in the sophisticated program. Overall the rehabilitation program ensures that the patient achieves controlled muscle reinforcement as the clinician can choose and tailor the appropriate exercise to the patient.
The AnkleTutor™ system incorporates patient record software that allows quantitative reports of the patient's rehabilitation to be saved and detailed in treatment and progress reports. This allows the clinician to evaluate and justify the rehabilitation process and further tailor rehabilitation to the patient's ankle, forefoot and lower extremity impairment. In addition the Physiotherapist and or other Physical therapist can use the AnkleTutor ™ technology to work on several motor impairments simultaneously.
The system is sold into physical rehabilitation primary care centers and it allows the clinician to offer both acute and chronic inpatient and outpatient ankle and forefoot lower extremity rehabilitation treatment. The AnkleTutor ™ is also used by general physiotherapy clinics in the community and allows them to offer their patients a high tech treatment option for ankle, forefoot and lower extremity rehabilitation.
Because repetitive and intensive rehabilitation exercises are needed to achieve the best rehabilitation results, the AnkleTutor™ with its motivating software is available for home care use. The home care version allows the patient to achieve accelerated rehabilitation by continuing their treatment sessions at home. Rehabilitation is therefore not just limited to the hospital and primary care clinic and exercise sessions can take place whenever the patient is motivated and available to train. This ensures greater patient treatment acceptance and compliance and further improves their exercise performance. Clinical research concludes that the AnkleTutor™ IOT with augmented feedback system used in combination with traditional exercises and repetitive functional tasks speeds up the rehabilitation process and enhances the patient's performance of everyday tasks therefore improving quality of life.