Health x Wellness
Heaxel launches icone in Singapore
Heaxel goes beyond telerehabilitation and brings a neurorehabilitation robot directly to the patient.
The Covid-19 pandemic continues to toss challenges and difficulties for patients to access clinical or rehabilitation facilities. There continues to be logistic challenges and visiting limitations arising from social distancing.
Robotic technology is even more inaccessible to the majority of individuals who could benefit from it.
Heaxel’s icone is a major step towards overcoming these barriers. Using a cloud-based approach to data administration and the possibilities for remote support, icone is looking to bring neurorehabilitation along with intensive, personalised, engaging therapy closer to patients.
Heaxel has gone beyond telerehabilitation, and looks to bring a a neurorehabilitation robot directly into rehabilitation gyms, community centres or patients’ homes. This switch towards home rehabilitation is especially useful for patients who require treatments and cannot be hospitalised for months.
What is Neurorehabilitation?
Neurorehabilitation is about helping the brain heal itself and regain control from a nervous system injury. It can often improve function, reduce symptoms, and boost the wellbeing
of the patient.
Several scientific studies have demonstrated that intensive neurorehabilitation is effective even years after the injury, for example, with stroke patients. Special interactive medical robots can effectively support intensive neurorehabilitation.
Post-stroke intensive rehabilitation in hospitals cannot last indefinitely, therefore it is necessary to follow up with patients after discharge, ensuring a continuum of care.
However, such advanced devices were only available in leading hospitals and preeminent rehabilitation centres.
Heaxel is seeking to disrupt the field of neurorehabilitation with icone.
What does icone do?
Rehabilitation is fundamental, otherwise the patient will tend not to use the affected limb anymore. With icone it is possible to rediscover and reintegrate the limb into daily life. The sooner the robotic treatment starts, the more the patient’s life can be improved in terms of quality and
interaction.
icone® is the first neurorehabilitation robot for the upper limb cleared for out-of-hospital use.
It is clinically validated and uniquely poised to make robotic neurorehabilitation available outside of clinical settings, enabling the continuum of care.
The robot can engage and motivate patients via interactive, personalised exergames and planar reaching tasks. It supports clinicians in tailoring and delivering intense rehabilitation treatments.
A patient’s performance is continuously monitored and icone can optimise its assistance specific to the patient’s needs. Clinicians can receive quantitative information as well as provide immediate feedback to patients.
Adaptive interaction control, full sensing capabilities, and an easy setup allow clinicians to adopt any therapeutic protocol involving elbow flexion-extension, shoulder protraction retraction, internal-external rotation, flexion-extension and abduction-adduction.
All the data is also remotely accessible via icone cloud, designed to overcome the shortcomings of existing telerehabilitation platforms in terms of infrastructure and training requirements.
icone is the first robotic medical device cleared for use not only in hospitals and clinics, but also in rehabilitation gyms, community centres, and even at home. It offers medical doctors and therapists the opportunity to provide intensive rehabilitation to neurological patients, allowing the adoption of the Continuum of Care paradigm where the neurorehabilitation therapy starts in hospitals and clinics and continues afterwards, outside clinical settings, for the benefit of chronic patients.
Maria Teresa Francomano, Co-Founder & Executive Director of Heaxel Pte Ltd
Images credit to Heaxel
