Robotic neck brace can help analyze cancer treatment impacts

Date:
July 19, 2021
Source:
Columbia University School of Engineering and Applied Science
Summary:
A new robotic neck brace may help doctors analyze the impact of
cancer treatments on the neck mobility of patients and may help
guide their recovery.



FULL STORY ==========================================================================
A new robotic neck brace from researchers at Columbia Engineering and
their colleagues at Columbia's Department of Otolaryngology may help
doctors analyze the impact of cancer treatments on the neck mobility of patients and guide their recovery.


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Head and neck cancer was the seventh most common cancer worldwide in
2018, with 890,000 new cases and 450,000 deaths, accounting for 3%
of all cancers and more than 1.5% of all cancer deaths in the United
States. Such cancer can spread to lymph nodes in the neck, as well as
other organs in the body. Surgically removing lymph nodes in the neck
can help doctors investigate the risk of spread, but may result in pain
and stiffness in the shoulders and neck for years afterward.

Identifying which patients may have issues with neck movement "can be difficult, as the findings are often subtle and challenging to quantify,"
said Scott Troob, assistant professor of otolaryngology -- head and neck surgery and division chief of facial plastic and reconstructive surgery at Columbia University Irving Medical Center. However, successfully targeting
what difficulties they might have with mobility can help patients benefit
from targeted physical therapy interventions, he explained.

The current techniques and tools that doctors have to judge the range of
motion a patient may have lost in their neck and shoulders are somewhat
crude, explained Sunil K. Agrawal, a professor of mechanical engineering
and rehabilitative and regenerative medicine and director of the ROAR
(Robotics and Rehabilitation) Laboratory at Columbia Engineering. They
usually either provide unreliable measurements or require too much time
and space to set up for use in routine clinical visits.

To develop a more reliable and portable tool to analyze neck mobility,
Agrawal and his colleagues drew inspiration from a robotic neck brace
they previously developed to analyze head and neck motions in patients
with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). In partnership with Troob's
group, they have now designed a new wearable robotic neck brace. Their
study appears July 12 in the journal Wearable Technologies.

The new brace was made using 3D-printed materials and inexpensive
sensors. The easy-to-wear device was based on the head and neck movements
of 10 healthy individuals.

"This is the first study of this kind where a wearable robotic neck brace
has been designed to characterize the full head and neck range of motion," Agrawal said.

In the new study, the researchers used the prototype brace, along with electrical measurements of muscle activity, to compare the neck mobility
of five cancer patients before and one month after surgical removal of
neck lymph nodes. They found their device could precisely detect changes
in patient neck movements during routine clinical visits.

"Use of the sensing neck brace allows a surgeon to screen patients postoperatively for movement difficulty, quantify their degree of
impairment, and select patients for physical therapy and rehabilitation,"
Troob said.

"Patients consistently identify need for rehabilitation and guided
exercises after surgery as an unmet need in their medical care,"
Troob said. "This work will lay the foundation for the appropriate identification of patients for intervention. We additionally hope that
through using the neck brace, we will be able to objectively quantify
their improvement and develop evidence-based rehabilitative programs."
In the future, the researchers hope to investigate larger groups of
patients and use the neck brace to follow patients through physical
therapy to develop evidence-based protocols for rehabilitation, Troob
said. They also would like to develop similar braces for other surgical
sites, such as the forearm, ankle, or knee, he added.

========================================================================== Story Source: Materials provided by Columbia_University_School_of_Engineering_and_Applied Science. Note:
Content may be edited for style and length.


========================================================================== Journal Reference:
1. Biing-Chwen Chang, Haohan Zhang, Sallie Long, Adetokunbo Obayemi,
Scott
H. Troob, Sunil K. Agrawal. A novel neck brace to characterize
neck mobility impairments following neck dissection in head
and neck cancer patients. Wearable Technologies, 2021; 2 DOI:
10.1017/wtc.2021.8 ==========================================================================

Link to news story: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/07/210719143424.htm

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