In-home Rehabilitation Of Stroke Patients Using Haptics Technology

Ageing populations are causing a growing need for rehabilitation services to restore motor function after stroke, joint injury, or other health complications. This demand has motivated the development of robotic technologies to provide motor therapy and assessment as a complement to traditional physiotherapy programs. Robots can provide highly reproducible, precise, and controlled motions to train patients’ movements, often in the context of an engaging virtual reality environment. They also support therapists in performing physiotherapy exercises that would be highly repetitive or physically demanding without robotic assistance.

In recent years, robots have been used to rehabilitate the arm, wrist, fingers, gait and posture of survivors of stroke and spinal-cord injury, achieving results comparable to those obtained through traditional physiotherapy programs. Since patients often experience a decline in motor performance when they cease to receive frequent physiotherapy training upon discharge from a hospital, we aim to develop in-home robotic rehabilitation technologies that will allow patients to continue practicing rehabilitation exercises at home with robotic assistance.

In parallel, we seek to design algorithms to quantitatively assess motor performance using robotically-captured records of the patient’s motions. Traditional motor performance assessment scales require a human expert to subjectively score a patient’s motor abilities. Robotic assessment methodologies promise to supplement these scales with highly reproducible, objective tests that are efficient to administer and more sensitive to subtle changes in motor function.