Page 199 - Control Theory in Biomedical Engineering

180 Control theory in biomedical engineering

Fig. 24 ROSA ONE’s arm, by LucileBssg, used under CC BY-SA 4.0, https://en.wikipedia.
org/wiki/ROSA#/media/File:ROSA_One%C2%AE_Robot_.jpg.

age of populations continues to rise, policies should be implemented to
address the needs and interests of older persons, including healthcare.
Furthermore, as neurological conditions, especially stroke, are a major cause
of disability among older people (Krebs and Volpe, 2013), this situation
creates an urgent need for new approaches to improve the effectiveness
and efficiency of rehabilitation. It also creates an unprecedented opportunity
to deploy technologies such as robotics to assist in the recovery process
(Krebs and Volpe, 2013). Movement disorders significantly reduce a
patient’s quality of life and limit the independence of affected subjects.
Fortunately, there are various approaches to restore functionality like
ortheses, functional electrical stimulation, and physical therapy (Maciejasz
et al., 2014). Rehabilitation and assistive robotics have the potential
to change older people lives, improving their recovery and/or supporting
them to perform everyday tasks (Garcia-Aracil et al., 2017). Some robotic
devices like wheelchairs not only provide support to stakeholders but also
to caregivers (Shishehgar et al., 2018).
Among assistive devices, the most popular are rehabilitation robotic
devices (Colombo and Sanguineti, 2018), exoskeletons (Aliman et al.,
2017; Bai et al., 2018), and prosthetic (Tucker et al., 2015) and orthotic
devices (Dzahir and Yamamoto, 2014). Rehabilitation robotics are machines
used in order to actively assist and/or resist the motion of the stroke patient,
increase efficiency, and reduce cost by decreasing the amount of one-on-one
time that a therapist must spend with a patient. Therapeutic robots can also
continuously collect data that can be used to quantitatively measure the
patient’s progress throughout the recovery process, enabling therapists to
optimize treatment techniques. Robotic orthotics are mechanisms used to