Development of Robots for Active Rehabilitation of the upper Limbs on the Transverse Plan for Stroke Patients - Biomechatronics in Medicine and Healthcare - page 133

Figure 9.5 Flow chart for customized rehabilitation program.

rehabilitation program. In manual rehabilitation, therapists have a feeling of the
subject's status and perform rehabilitation individually. However the feeling or
the measure is qualitatively or even elusive. In the robotic rehabilitation, the
rehabilitation program is uniform or is adjustable but there is no definite rule for
adjustment. Hogan's group tried several modes of performance-based treatments
with robots (Krebs et al. , 2003). The results were promising but needed to be
verified. We did a study on a custom-made flow chart for patients rehabilitating
with the robot (Wu et al. , 2002). The basic idea is to change the resistant load
periodically based on the quantitative performance parameters ( Fig. 9.5 ). The
study is preliminary, in the sense that many parameters in the rehabilitation
program can also be changed during the progress. It requires more extensive
studies to determine what is the optimal combination and temporal relation of
changes.

9.5 CONCLUSIONS

In this chapter, we reviewed the existing robot systems and their controllers for
the purpose of upper limb rehabilitation. Robot systems were shown to improve
motor recovery, more significant in proximal part, but not in functional ability.