Do Simulated Hospital Admissions Reflect Reality? A Qualitative Study of Volunteer Well-Being During a 24-Hr Simulated Hospitalization.

Objectives: This study aims to delineate if and how healthy volunteers admitted to simulated care can aid in understanding real well-being experiences of in-hospital surgical patients.

Background: Scientific research is necessary to understand the mediating effect of healthcare design on patient outcomes. Studies with patients are, however, difficult to conduct as they require substantial funding, time, and research capacity, and recovering patients are often not willing or able to participate.

Environmental Needs, Barriers, and Facilitators for Optimal Healing in the Postoperative Process: A Qualitative Study of Patients' Lived Experiences and Perceptions.

Objectives: Gaining an understanding of postoperative patients' environmental needs, barriers, and facilitators for optimal healing.

Background: An optimal hospital environment (the "healing environment") can enhance patients' postoperative recovery and shorten length of stay. However, insights lack into patients' lived environmental needs for optimal healing after surgery and how these needs are being met.

Effects of training with a passive hand orthosis and games at home in chronic stroke: a pilot randomised controlled trial.

Objectives: To compare user acceptance and arm and hand function changes after technology-supported training at home with conventional exercises in chronic stroke. Secondly, to investigate the relation between training duration and clinical changes.

Design: A randomised controlled trial.

Feasibility study into self-administered training at home using an arm and hand device with motivational gaming environment in chronic stroke.

Background: Assistive and robotic training devices are increasingly used for rehabilitation of the hemiparetic arm after stroke, although applications for the wrist and hand are trailing behind. Furthermore, applying a training device in domestic settings may enable an increased training dose of functional arm and hand training. The objective of this study was to assess the feasibility and potential clinical changes associated with a technology-supported arm and hand training system at home for patients with chronic stroke.

The experience of living with stroke and using technology: opportunities to engage and co-design with end users.

Purpose: We drew on an interdisciplinary research design to examine stroke survivors' experiences of living with stroke and with technology in order to provide technology developers with insight into values, thoughts and feelings of the potential users of a to-be-designed robotic technology for home-based rehabilitation of the hand and wrist.

Method: Ten stroke survivors and their family carers were purposefully selected. On the first home visit, they were introduced to cultural probe.

Grasps recognition and evaluation of stroke patients for supporting rehabilitation therapy.

Stroke survivors often suffer impairments on their wrist and hand. Robot-mediated rehabilitation techniques have been proposed as a way to enhance conventional therapy, based on intensive repeated movements. Amongst the set of activities of daily living, grasping is one of the most recurrent.

Training modalities in robot-mediated upper limb rehabilitation in stroke: a framework for classification based on a systematic review.

Robot-mediated post-stroke therapy for the upper-extremity dates back to the 1990s. Since then, a number of robotic devices have become commercially available. There is clear evidence that robotic interventions improve upper limb motor scores and strength, but these improvements are often not transferred to performance of activities of daily living.