Development of an equipment to detect and quantify muscular spasticity: Spastimed: a new solution

Abstract

Spasticity is a known muscular tonus velocity dependent alteration which quantification in clinical practice is still based on subjective perception and scale grading through procedures that lack controlled protocols. In the research field, both physician's and engineer's researches have pointed the potentialities in the use of biomechanical magnitudes and their physiological meanings as much lesser subjective means of quantifying spasticity as well as its effects on patient daily life. Last, but not less important, this scientific and clinic urge is also justified by the high costs of treatments as well as the very tight relation they express between effectiveness and applied dose. As a consequence, this team of developers has been focused in creating a device to detect spasticity. During the validation of a first prototype with a small set of subjects, the obtained results were satisfyingly good as the device correctly detected 89% of the spastic subjects and 82% of the nonspastic subjects. Even so, the limitations found in the prototype concept itself led to a new development phase that resulted on a very different approach. SpastiMed, a motorized and electronically controlled device which is still on its validation phase but already showing an immense potential.