The LegTutor™ is a safe comfortable leg brace consisting of both a knee and ankle brace. evaluates and treats extension/ flexion of the knee and Dorsal/ Plantal flexion of the ankle. The LegTutor™ allows for the implementation of an active exercise based knee, ankle and lower extremity rehabilitation program that uses the accepted rehabilitation principles of impairment orientated training (IOT) with augmented feedback.
The LegTutor™ lower extremity rehabilitation program is based on a safe comfortable brace with position and speed sensors together with the dedicated rehabilitation software package. There are four brace sizes for both left and right sides. The LegTutor™ has position and speed sensors which, together with the MediTutor™ specialized rehabilitation software package provide a lower extremity rehabilitation solution. The lower extremity rehabilitation biofeedback system gives Physiotherapists and other Physical Therapists access to an affordable user friendly lower extremity knee and ankle rehabilitation package.
- Stroke
- Head injuries
- Spinal cord Injury
- Cerebral Palsy
- Multiple Sclerosis
- Drop Foot
- Ankle surgery rehabilitation
- Knee surgery rehabilitation such as TKR
- Leg surgery rehabilitation
- Leg muscle weakness
- Parkinson's disease
- Lumbar Plexus nerve injury
- Femoral or Tibial fractures or soft tissue injuries
- Femoral, Tibial and Peroneal nerve injuries
With the LegTutor™ 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 extension and flexion of the knee and Dorsal and Plantar flexion of the ankle. 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 lower extremity rehabilitation treatments and therapy.
The lower extremity rehabilitation program allows the clinician to firstly evaluate the patient's leg 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 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 lower extremity 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. Augmented feedback is provided to the patient in the form of quantitative, qualitative and terminal, concurrent augmented feedback. The rehabilitation package has been designed to ensure that the patient remains challenged and motivated.
All the exercises can be performed at different difficulty levels and can be customized to the patient's lower limb impairment and movement ability. The exercise tasks have been developed for different patient motor, sensory and cognitive function levels. 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 leg 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 LegTutor™ system incorporates patient record software that allows quantitative charts showing the patient's rehabilitation progress to be saved and used later in treatment reports. This allows the clinician to evaluate and justify the rehabilitation process and further tailor rehabilitation to the patient's leg and lower extremity impairment. In addition the Physiotherapist and or other Physical therapist can use the LegTutor ™ technology to work on several motor impairments simultaneously and rehabilitate the pattern of knee and ankle movements.
The system is sold into physical primary care rehabilitation centers and it allows the clinician to offer both acute and chronic out patient lower extremity rehabilitation treatment. The LegTutor ™ is also used by general physiotherapy clinics in the community and allows them to offer their patients a high tech treatment option for leg and lower limb rehabilitation.
Because repetitive and intensive rehabilitation exercises are needed to achieve the best rehabilitation results, the LegTutor™ 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 as the system allows exercise sessions to 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 LegTutor™ 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.