Abstract

This paper presents a Robotic Platform that allows the evaluation of novel rehabilitation therapies by combining assistance and assessment. The robotic platform control loop consists of three nested elements. First, the patient wrist is firmly attached to a redundant robot running an impedance based low-level control loop. Secondly, an Assistance Loop, involving a GUI for the therapist to set the parameters, and an Assist-as-Needed exercise execution thread. Finally, the Assessment Loop continuously computes and displays the evolution of the performance and suggests new parameters for the given therapy. The suggested architecture has proved to be able to successfully evaluate two therapy aspects: the effect of the assistance levels (fully assisted, non-assisted and resistive mode) and the effect of a misalignment between the robot and the patient’s elbow rotation axis. From the first experimental tests of the assessment loop, it is expected that the nature of this implementation allows the systematic evaluation and comparison of a much broader range of robotic techniques for upper limb rehabilitation and clinical assessment.