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314 HANDBOOK OF ELECTRONIC ASSISTIVE TECHNOLOGY

Application of Robotics in Rehabilitation

The field of rehabilitation robotics is diverse and over the last few decades, robots have
been developed for assistive and rehabilitative functions. They can be broadly classified
into the following three categories:

1� Robots for physical therapy and movement assistance.
2� Socially assistive robots.
3� Robots for supporting Activities of Daily Living (ADL).

Robots for Physical Therapy and Movement Assistance

A number of systems have been developed to provide limb movement therapy for people
with neuromuscular disorders, particularly stroke. Physiotherapy works on the principle that
repetitive exercise programmes in assistive external environments, enable the rewiring or
strengthening of neuromuscular pathways to the brain. A major goal of rehabilitation fol-
lowing stroke is to promote recovery of lost motor control. Evidence suggests that providing
early, intensive, task-specific therapy with multisensory stimulation leads to effective reha-
bilitation outcomes (Poli et al., 2013; Masiero et al., 2014). Several studies highlight the capac-
ity for motor learning resulting from intensive, repetitive and task-oriented motor activities.
However, conventional therapy is labour intensive and physically demanding. Therefore cost
and labour limitations have meant that traditional therapies are not delivered more inten-
sively or frequently (Norouzi-Gheidari et al., 2012). A role thus exists for integrating robotic
devices into clinical practice, that can provide effective therapy for neurorehabilitation,
while decreasing the burden on clinical staff and the costs of health care (Lum et al., 2005).
The use of robotic technology in physical therapy offers the following benefits (Huang
and Krakauer, 2009):
• Robots have the potential to provide intensive, highly repetitive rehabilitation training
protocols consistently and for longer durations, thereby reducing the risk of excessive
fatigue for physiotherapists and enabling standardisation of rehabilitation protocols.
• They enable us to measure movement kinematics and dynamics, and thereby
objectively evaluate progress or changes in impairment in response to treatment.
• They offer the possibility to provide complex, controlled multisensory stimuli to the
user enabling the performance of various task-orientated activities.

It should be noted that the application of robotic technology in clinical practice is not
intended to replace physiotherapists but to support and complement conventional phys-
iotherapy (Babaiasl et al., 2015).
Robotic rehabilitation systems developed to date can be classified based on (Gopura
and Kiguchi, 2009):
• The applied segment (upper limb, lower limb).
• The number of DOFs offered.