Robot Assisted Recovery and Rehabilitation

A patient suffering from diseases or neuromuscular injuries, such as occur in the aftereffects of stroke, often benefit form neuro-rehabilitation. This process exploits the use dependent plasticity of the human neuromuscular system, in which use alters the property of neurons and muscles, including their pattern of their connectivity, and their function. Sensory motor therapy, in which patient makes upper extremity or lower extremity movements physically assisted by a human therapist or robot, helps people re-learn how to move. This process is time consuming and labor intensive, but pays large dividends in term of patient health care cost and return the labor productivity. As an alternative to human only therapy, a robot has several key advantages for intervention:
• The robot can provide consistent, lengthy, a personalized therapy without tiring after set up.
• The robot can acquire data to give an objective quantification of recovery using sensors.
• The robot can implement therapy exercises not possible by human therapist.

There are already significant clinical results from the use of robot to retrain lower and upper limb movement abilities for individual who have had neurological injury such as cerebral stroke. These rehabilitation robots provide many different forms of mechanical input, such as resisting, assisting, stretching and perturbing, based on the subject’s real time response. For instance, the commercially available MIT –Manus rehabilitation robot showed improved recovery of both chronic and acute stroke patient.

Another exciting implication of sensory motor therapy with robot is that they can help neuroscientists improve their general function of understanding brain. Through knowledge of robot based perturbations to the patient and quantification response of patients with damage to particular areas of brain, robot can make unprecedented recording of stimulus response. These relationships understanding also give neuroscientists and neurologists insight into function of brain, which can contribute to basic research in those fields.