Musical Glove Helps Those With Spinal Cord Injuries

Georgia Tech researchers have created a wireless, musical glove that may improve sensation and motor skills for people with paralyzing spinal cord injury (SCI). The gadget - called Mobile Music Touch - was successfully used by individuals with limited feeling or movement in their hands due to tetraplegia. These individuals had sustained their injury more than a year before the study, a time frame when most rehab patients see very little improvement for the remainder of their lives. The glove is used with a piano keyboard and vibrates a person's fingers to indicate which keys to play. While learning to play the instrument, several people with SCI experienced improved sensation in their fingers.

Transcript

00:00:04 so the way Mobile Music touch works is when I first introduce a new song to a participant what we do is we'll play the whole song all the way through and let them see the song The the keys light up hear the song play and of course they also feel it vibrating on their fingers so what's happening is we're essentially tapping the correct finger to use to play a particular note using the

00:00:23 vibration after that we don't expect anyone to go through and learn the song All In One Fell Swoop just like anything else you want to break it into to bite-sized pieces so here's the first little phrase of OD to Joy so what I would do is I'd play the phrase they feel it vibrating they see the song and can hear it and then have them attempt to recreate that uh on

00:00:43 their own from what they've just felt and learned and that's how it works what surprised us the most in terms of the findings from this study was uh just how much uh difference there was in the The Sensation that people got back after using the glove versus those that didn't I've had individuals say that you know now I can pick up very

00:01:07 small objects that I couldn't pick up before that was really exciting because it was having an impact immediately on on the lives of some of the participants we expected there to be a difference uh but we saw a much greater difference than than we had hoped in the beginning of the study