Leprosy is an infectious disease that causes severe, disfiguring skin sores and nerve damage in the arms, legs, and skin areas around your body. Leprosy has been around since ancient times. Outbreaks have affected people on every continent.
But leprosy, also known as Hanson’s disease, isn’t that contagious. You can catch it only if you come into close and repeated contact with nose and mouth droplets from someone with untreated leprosy. Children are more likely to get leprosy than adults.
Leprosy is caused by a slow-growing type of bacteria called Mycobacterium leprae (M. leprae).
It isn’t clear exactly how leprosy is transmitted. When a person with leprosy coughs or sneezes, they may spread droplets containing the M. leprae bacteria that another person breathes in.
When it comes to its symptoms, Leprosy primarily affects your skin and nerves outside your brain and spinal cord, called the peripheral nerves. It may also strike your eyes and the thin tissue lining the inside of your nose.
The main symptom of leprosy is disfiguring skin sores, lumps, or bumps that don’t go away after several weeks or months. The skin sores are pale-colored.
A number of medicinal treatments are available to treat the repercussions of this disease; non-medicinal physical therapy, however, is at the top of treatments’ list.
In fact, physical therapy in leprosy strengthens muscles, decreases and prevents contractures, recovers and maintains joint mobility, maintains tone, integrity and elasticity of skin and prevents deformities.
However, what is often taken as a common belief in this regard is that physical therapy solely occurs in a hospital or clinical setting. Luckily, nowadays, it can migrate toward home therapy thanks to the cutting-edge technology of the Rehabilitation Robot Gloves: SIFREHAB-1.1 and SIFREHAB-1.0.
These hand rehabilitation devices mobilize the affected joints and work both in flexion and extension. Even on the patient who has no active residual movement, it is possible to apply passive mobilization from the first stages of treatment. Luckily, the software offers many possibilities for the customization of the therapy.
In the same regard, the Portable Rehabilitation Robotic Gloves: SIFREHAB-1.0 would amplify force in the direction the user tries to move (open or close his fingers to avoid contractures and promote skin elasticity).
The following home rehabilitation equipment can also provide resistance in the opposite direction to help the user with movement stabilization or hand muscle tone exercise. In other words, the design could be implemented for a wide range of needs and users, particularly Leprosy patients.
In a nutshell, SIFREHAB-1.0 and SIFREHAB-1.1 provide a low-cost, safe, intensive, and task-oriented rehabilitation through home therapy, which can improve treatment efficacy by including the recovery of daily-living-activity functions as well as a home environment modification.
To summarize, individuals suffering from Leprosy disease and still hesitant about the appropriate treatment plan who should follow may think of the SIFREHAB-1.0 and SIFREHAB-1.1 Rehabilitation Robot Gloves as the most suitable alternatives since it will help them improve their symptoms over time by performing hand therapy exercises independently at home.
Reference: Hanson’s disease