Taiwanese and Kiwi engineers combine to help patients with brain injuries
By Amanda Cropp
Stroke victims are among those benefiting from a highly successful relationship between a New Zealand Crown research institute and its Taiwanese counterpart.
Industrial Research Limited (IRL) and Taiwan’s Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) are developing rehabilitation devices to help patients with brain injuries recover limb movement.
The close collaboration between the two research bodies resulted from a chance meeting between IRL biomedical engineer Marcus King and ITRI’s Richard Shau during a Taiwanese trade delegation visit to New Zealand in 2007.
Inspired by their shared interest in rehabilitation, the pair began working together on some projects.
Their first device, the Able-X, went on sale in late 2010 and is essentially a computer game fitted with a handlebar arrangement, which helps improve hand-eye coordination.
A commercial version of a handheld dynamometer, which physiotherapists use to measure the strength and range of movement in the limbs of patients recovering from strokes, will hit the open market in a few months.
A bilateral exerciser that allows stroke patients with more severe paralysis to improve arm strength is set to go into production later this year.
“Lots of research shows that what people want back is their hand and arm function, it’s more important than anything else. In young people with spinal cord injury (primarily young men) it’s more important than sex,” says King.
Two-thirds of stroke patients leave hospital with one arm that is weak or even paralysed, which hugely affects their quality of life. The goal is to provide patients with affordable rehab equipment for home use.
King says that in terms of size, IRL and ITRI are at opposite ends of the scale. “They’ve got 6,500 staff and we’ve got about 380.”
However, the two organisations work well together because they have very similar structures and funding arrangements, with about half the money coming from government and the other half from private business.
Their areas of expertise complement each other too. “The really special thing they see from us is the innovation, so our role is to keep pushing more and more innovative ideas into the pool.”
ITRI engineers then fine-tune the Kiwi prototypes.
“With the dynamometer, we’d really struggled to miniaturise it down to a handheld device. We’d build one-offs with people soldering up circuit boards under a microscope trying to get them smaller. [ITRI] took it to their commercial electronics manufacturers, and have created a beautiful prototype device which looks just like something you’d buy in an electronics shop.”
“They have access to huge electronics manufacturers and a scale of production we could not conceive of. Cost is a huge thing. I’m not making MRI machines that I can sell for $1 million at a time. I’m making things that I’m trying to sell for $1,000, a million at a time. And the only way we can do that is with Asian partnership.”
King says the nature of our accident compensation system means he is able to do early-stage patient testing that is impossible in most developed countries because of the risk of being sued if someone is injured.
Once products are further developed, Taiwan offers opportunities for large-scale clinical trials that can be written up for medical publications.
King says his friendship with Shau has been the key to their successful collaboration. New Zealand firms wanting to work with Asian partners must recognise the importance of personal relationships and the need to visit in person.
“If you’re not going to make the effort to get over there every six months, then don’t even bother.”
He also says it’s easy to waste a lot of time discussing the possibility of collaborating, so it's much better to come up with something specific to work on.
“I have a pretty strong filtering process. If there’s someone I want to work with I will create a project plan and give it to them.”
Images:
1. ITRI and IRL worked together on a dynamometer
2. The ITRI site in Taiwan - Marcus King notes that ITRI operates on a much larger scale that IRL