The Cleveland FES Center congratulates Michael Fu, PhD on receiving a 5-year National Science Foundation CAREER Award to research FES as an assist-as-needed technology to improve muscle movement recovery after stroke.
It is unknown how much actual effort a person is maintaining during FES in stroke therapy. This may be a problem because the brain learns best after stroke when a person actively tries to move the paretic limb, rather than having it passively moved by electrical pulse. Fu’s team is designing a wearable device that will only assist when needed, and a control algorithm that measures muscle exertion amid the noise of the electrical stimulation being artificially applied to those muscle.
