When I was a young physiotherapy student in Vellore, India, I worked in a neuroscience lab as a research assistant. My supervisor at the time, Dr. Marcus Devanandan, was trying to learn how our brains controlled our hands by studying how monkey’s brains worked. I spent many evenings in that lab—maintaining surgery notes, performing data analysis, and keeping schedules. 

A lot of it was grunt work, but it sparked in me a lifelong interest in the extraordinary complexity behind our everyday movements. As I continued my studies, my fascination with dexterity deepened when I began interacting with patients disabled by stroke, who struggled with hand movements that had once been effortless. 

That dexterity is something we often take for granted. In Canada, about 80,000 adults over the age of 20 experience a stroke each year—15 million worldwide. Higher rates of stroke survival mean that more people are living with the symptoms: difficulty speaking to or understanding loved ones, paralysis on one side of the body and general weakness. 

Stroke is the leading cause of adult disability. Half of Canadians who’ve experienced a stroke need help with daily activities. Despite this, in the years since I was a student, the treatment options available to patients who want to regain control of the paralyzed parts of their body have evolved very little. Patients are often recommended either occupational therapy or robotic stimulation, where a clinician places an electrical stimulator on a patient’s paralyzed limb and zaps it to foster movement. 

But I’ve witnessed how current therapeutic approaches can take years to see significant results, which can be disheartening for people living with stroke and for their caregivers, and electrical stimulation cannot execute the same controlled, exacting movements that the human brain can execute. 

Say you wanted to learn to play tennis. The more you practice—hitting a ball over and over on the court— the more your hand, eye, shoulder, and feet would learn to work together. Over time you’d develop keen muscle memory, and you’d get better at playing. Now imagine letting a robot guide your movements in order to teach you. Someone puts an electrical sensor on your arm, and when it comes time to hit the ball, it electrically stimulates your arm into the position.

If someone told you that’s how you should learn to play tennis, you would probably laugh at them, but that form of electrical stimulation has been the mainstay treatment option for stroke patients for the last 80 years. It’s not suitable for people who want to regain their independence and do everyday activities like cooking dinner or getting dressed on their own. I know I wouldn’t want anyone using a kitchen knife or driving a car with that kind of sporadic movement. 

It was as a doctoral student at McGill University that I realized we needed real solutions to assist those living with chronic stroke if they wanted to return to their daily lives. Armed with an understanding of the brain’s remarkable capabilities and vulnerability to injury, I founded IRegained to fundamentally rethink how occupational therapists approach rehabilitation for stroke and brain injury survivors. Over time we developed a prototype called MyHand, a therapeutic device that helps patients regain finger and hand function. 

Based on the concept of neuroplasticity—our brain and spinal cords’s resilient ability to adapt—MyHand trains patients’ brains to move their muscles, not their limbs. Patients sit facing at MyHand’s tablet screen and rest their hand on an arm rest so their fingers can reach into our technology’s custom cups, which provides the system with feedback. On a separate screen, a clinician picks a game for their patients from a number of options, each of which demands different, precise finger movement for a patient to complete it. What sets MyHand apart is its ability to work within the incredible range of the human hand’s movement, from softly tapping one finger to using the whole hand to grip an object. 

Consider your daily activities: typing on a keyboard requires an entirely different hand position than holding a coffee mug or buttoning a shirt. MyHand enables training across an entire spectrum of hand motions and is built for all hand sizes, from a child’s to a basketball player’s. Over the course of the day, a clinician can help multiple patients with unique recovery goals, be it strengthening their muscles, practicing coordinated movements, or work on particular actions they want to regain. 

Focusing on retraining the brain instead of retraining the muscles in the hand should be the industry standard if we want faster recovery times for stroke patients. Patients who’ve used MyHand have shown significant, measured improvements, including the ability to do everyday tasks, like answering the phone after just three sessions with the device. Other therapies on the market might not see improvement until nine or more sessions. One patient came to us 11 years after he experienced a stroke. He’d tried all kinds of therapies and devices, none of which gave him any results. After joining a three-week clinical study where he used MyHand, he could chop vegetables and tie his own shoelaces. 

At IRegained, we work directly with hospitals to integrate MyHand into their programs and budgets. Ontario hospitals like Royal Victoria Hospital in Barrie and Walk it Off rehab clinic in New Market have already implemented its use in their occupational and physical therapy programs, and we have signed deals with distribution companies, who do some of the selling for us. 

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As an early stage startup, we often go to hospitals that have purchased the device to give their team more training and learn about what their needs are. It’s what allows us to keep innovating. One idea on the docket is to create a version of the MyHand device that people could take home and train on without worrying about spending many clinical hours at the hospital or physical therapy centre. 

I know MyHand has the potential to transform people’s lives, not only those living with stroke, but it also has the opportunity to give close family members and caregivers their time back too. Recently, a patient came to us eight years after experiencing a stroke with no movement in either of his hands. He’s now regained control in his hands and can use his left hand to drive, garden, and hold a glass of beer. But importantly he’s no longer dependent on his wife, who had to help him with all those tasks. Not only is he freer in his everyday life, but his wife also got her independence back. 

—As told to Caroline Bellamy