Grant: Research Tools and Instruments

Robotic rehabilitation for motor therapy after stroke has attracted much attention in recent years. The virtual reality component of this technology keeps the patient engaged in rehabilitation exercises and stimulates neural activity while the robotic component provides patient-specific force interaction that allows the patient to perform repeatable tasks and exercises. However, there are still several limitations with the use of current rehabilitation robotic systems: 1) Rehabilitation robots are designed to exert considerable force so that a faulty situation, could result in an unsafe condition. Consequently, these robots are currently used in clinics under close monitoring and with very conservative safety measures. They are therefore not suitable for in home use. 2) The virtual reality environments used in existing systems are quite simplistic and do not represent activities of daily living (ADL). 3) While the rehabilitation robotic systems monitor the motor capabilities of patients, they do not track improvements or changes in their brain activities, although this is a key feature of successful neuro-rehabilitation . We are therefore interested in designing systems that provide interactive force-enabled neuro-rehabilitation while avoiding the above-mentioned issues. We propose to generate rehabilitative forces by actuating the existing muscles of the patient instead of externally applying forces via the robot. The system will be equipped with a Functional Electrical Stimulation (FES) module of the g.tec system, as a naturally-compatible multi-directional replacement of inherently-unsafe actuation mechanisms of current rehabilitation robotic systems. In addition, the sophisticated 3D virtual-reality module of the g.tec system will be used to design multi-directional large-scale rehabilitation tasks which are closely related to ADL. This is motivated by recent studies showing that the benefit of current approaches for robotic rehabilitation may be limited to the trained size of the workspace. Finally, the EEG module of the g.tec system will be used to conduct and synchronize quantitative monitoring of brain activities of patients with their motor capabilities. This will allow us to better assess the progress of rehabilitation and perform modifications if necessary. The g . tec system that we wish to acquire will provide us with the technology needed for designing the next generation of rehabilitation platforms that are force-enabled, interactive and capable of representing ADL tasks while being inherently safe for in-home use and able to achieve tracking improvements through neuro-rehabilitation.