Targeted Robotic UppEr-arm REHABilitation

An increasing amount of people, especially elderly ones, face mobility problems often due to a stroke or some kind of accident. To increase their quality of life and reduce their dependence on others, physical rehabilitation is necessary. The aim of the rehabilitation is to enable the people to re-learn how to use their limbs and strengthen the affected muscles. The traditional way of performing rehabilitation is by helping the patients pefrorm repetitive motions. A physiotherapist is monitoring their effort and progress and adjusts the task and the motion respectively. However, due to the fact that different patients have different mobility problems, the pre-defined repetitive motions do not constitute an optimal rehabilitation scheme for everyone. In other words, the rehabilitation is not always personalised.

TRUE REHAB

Our proposal is about designing a Targeted Robotic UppEr-arm REHABilitation scheme. We aim at defining tasks that are personalised and specific to each patient, with the ability to focus the training on specific muscles. To define these tasks, we will utilize methods from musculoskeletal modelling and various optimization methods. Once these tasks are defined, a collaborative robotic arm will assist the patient perform them, increasing the efficiency of the rehabilitation and reducing the overall duration of it. The solution could be easily implemented in various rehabilitation clinics as it does not require expensive equipment neither specialised personel for its operation.

Funding

This project is 100% funded by UEFISCDI and is part of the P1 line of funding (Development of the national system of R&D). It is a Young Teams (Tinere Echipe) project with contract number 22/2020 and a total budget of 431.900 RON.