Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 1.1
Scheme of the nervous system showing the different parts involved in motor
control. Relationships are marked by arrows.
to perform rehabilitation training after discharge from hospital and how to find a
better way for them to relearn motor functions.
Recent technologies have made it possible to use robotic devices as the assis-
tance to the therapist, providing safe and intensive rehabilitation with repeated
motions to persons after stroke (Colombo
et al
. (2005); Lum
et al
. (2002)). One
of the primary benefits of robotic technology is that the robot can assist the
human therapists to conduct rehabilitation programs with more quantitative and
reproducible training motions. Secondly, a rehabilitation robot could not only
share a large portion of the repeated labor work in a long-term physical training
program but could also be a platform for continuous and quantitative monitoring
of the performance during training, which may provide further understanding
on the recovery mechanism due to the standardized experimental setup and the
high repeatability of motion tasks. Positive effects on motor recovery have been
reported in many studies on robot-assisted poststroke trainings when compared
with conventional treatments. For example, robot-assisted gait training and robot-
assisted gait treatment augmented with FES on subacute stroke subjects (
6 weeks
poststroke) had better improvement on walking speed and more independent
walking ability than subjects receiving conventional gait therapy (Tong
et al.
(2006)).
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In comparing the effectiveness of robot-assisted training with active-
