Engineers develop TruST for spinal cord injuries.

A robotic Trunk Support Trainer (TruST) has been developed by Columbia University engineers in New York to help people with spinal cord injuries (SCI) improve their trunk control, thus allowing them to gain expanded work space area without needing to use their hands to balance. The TruSt, which is a motorised cable driven belt, operates by positioning onto the individual’s torso to help measure the work space area and the limits of postural control. In addition, the TruST distributes pressures on the torso whilst the individual is sitting down undertaking upper body movements outside of their postural stability limits.

Researchers conducted the Postural Star Sitting Test on five different participants with SCI, who took part in the small scale preliminary study. The unique postural test, which was repeated 8 times in different directions, involved the participants moving their trunk as far as they could go without using their hands to balance, whilst also following a ball with their head. The researchers altered the TruST so that the assistive force fields, which were applied onto the torso, were personalised for each participant, whilst they repeated the movements.

Researchers discovered from the study, published in Spinal Cord Series and Cases, that participants who used the TruST were able to reach further distances during the eight different trunk excursions and were also able to increase the sitting work space around their bodies by an average of twenty-five percent.

First author of the paper, Postdoctoral Researcher in Agrawal’s Robotics and Rehabilition Laborator and Physical Therapist, Victor Santamari, stated, “The capacity of TruST to deliver continuous force feedback personalised for the user’s postural limits opens new frontiers to implement motor learning based paradigms to retrain functional sitting in people with SCI. We think TruST is a very promising SCI rehab tool.”

The project’s Principal Investigator and Professor of Mechanical Engineering and of Rehabilitation and Regenerative Medicine, Sunil Agrawal; stated: “We designed TruST for people with SCIs who are typically wheelchair users. We found that TruST not only prevents patients from falling, but also maximises trunk movements beyond patients’ postural control or balance limits.”