Project description
A personalised, robotic, scalable home neurorehabilitation
Due to the ageing of societies and medical advances, the number of patients who survive strokes or brain injuries is growing. But their return to full physical functioning often requires a long period of rehabilitation therapy. Today, effective therapy is possible only in the hospital or clinic. This results in exclusion for many patients and costs. The EU-funded ICone project supports bringing to market the first portable robot for neurorehabilitation. The ICone robot will help to treat upper limbs. Built to work with networks on the cloud, it is the best solution for chronically ill patients, enabling virtual control. The project will allow effective and timely commercialisation of the first scalable, robotic and home-based rehabilitation system.
Objective
ICone - The best therapy, everywhere.
THE NEED FOR REHABILITATION IS INCREASING. Increasing the effectiveness of rehabilitation and lowering its cost is a global challenge, according to WHO. Due to the ageing population and higher survival rate after brain injuries (strokes), the number of stroke patients is increasing. Even years after the cerebrovascular accident, chronic patients hold potential for motor recovery; yet, intensive, interactive, challenging and personalized therapy is needed – this requires huge cost, long time, and resources.
ROBOTIC REHABILITATION STILL FACES TECHNICAL LIMITS. Robots for rehabilitation, science confirms, could represent an adequate solution to deliver cost-effective therapy that is intensive, interactive, challenging and personalized. The main drawback is that robots for rehabilitation cannot be used outside of the hospital, and so they are precluded to chronic stroke patients.
As a result, chronic patients hold potential for motor recovery, but they don’t have access to adequate treatment (robots).
ICone: SCALE-UP OF ROBOTIC THERAPY. Heaxel produced ICone, the first portable robot for the neurorehabilitation of the upper limb, cleared for use outside of the hospital. All the ICone robots will be connected all together into a cloud network, so to facilitate the access of chronic patients to robotic therapy.
FEASIBILITY STUDY. A Phase I project will allow to carefully organize customer development activities and go-to-market strategy. The business feasibility of different revenue models must be tested, to quickly and effectively start the commercialization of the robot, in order to deliver the best possible care to chronic patients. This Phase I study will be crucial, then, for an EIC acceleration project, where pilot clinical trials will be executed, as a validation of the market and of the proposed solution. Heaxel long-term goal is to bring robotic rehabilitation directly at the patient's home.
Fields of science
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
SME-1 - SME instrument phase 1Coordinator
20123 MILANO
Italy
The organization defined itself as SME (small and medium-sized enterprise) at the time the Grant Agreement was signed.