CSTARWestern Engineering

Tele-robotic Rehabilitation

In this project, a novel bilateral telerobotic architecture for tele-rehabilitation is developed. The objective of the designed tele-rehabilitation framework is to incorporate the supervision of a local or remote human therapist into force-enabled rehabilitation systems and to allow the therapist to provide assistive/resistive forces in response to the patient’s movements. The proposed architecture is a new paradigm for delivering motor therapy that gives therapists direct kinesthetic supervision over robotic rehabilitation procedures and is a step towards remote in-home supervised kinesthetic rehabilitation therapy. This can address a challenge of conventional software-based rehabilitation systems, i.e., limited capability in adjusting the therapy and the lack of direct kinesthetic interaction between a human therapist and the patient. Thus, the proposed framework can fuse the capabilities of conventional robotic therapy systems and the knowledge of a human therapist. The system allows the therapists to directly tune the difficulty and strategy of therapeutic force generation and to directly feel the patient’s motor performance during robotic therapy sessions. It also enables remote interaction between a clinic-based therapist and a home-based patient. This will resolve the accessibility issues and comes under the umbrella of tele-medicine. Consequently, force-enabled telerobotic rehabilitation can become a modality of telerehabilitation which has been identified in the literature as a possible future line of development for modern healthcare systems and can significantly increase the number of hours in which a remote patient can have access to rehabilitation services.

Tele-robotic Rehabilitation Publications