Does wearable tech help people recover from a stroke? It's not as simple as "yes" or "no"

A systematic review has been published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research (JMIR) entitled "The Effectiveness of Lower-Limb Wearable Technology for Improving Activity and Participation in Adult Stroke Survivors: A Systematic Review". 

The review was conducted by a team from the University of Sheffield: Miss Lauren Powell, Dr Jack Parker, Dr Marrissa Martyn-St James and Professor Sue Mawson.

It has found that there are a number of trials looking at the use of wearable technology to help stroke survivors improve the function of their lower limbs and many of these trials have found that their technologies, surprisingly don't improve function. This authors believe this is for a number of reasons including studies not testing their product on a large enough number of people, not using the correct methodology, the variety of stroke severity in participants and using outcome measures to test functionality incorrectly. In other words, it could be that these wearable technologies do improve function in people post stroke, but because some of the studies have been measuring function incorrectly and not using an appropriate methodologies, their findings gave the impression that they do not improve function.

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