Robot therapy: the importance of haptic interaction

This paper proposes some general principles for designing robot therapy protocols that best fit the need of integrating robot therapy with physical therapy, in order to assure patients with the best chance of a carryover from performance improvements, evaluated in the framework of rehabilitation exercises, to improvements in daily life activities. In particular, we emphasize the importance of using really haptic robots that can emulate the soft interaction between patient and human therapist, thus providing a haptic virtual environment. From this we derive the concept of minimally assistive strategy for hemiparetic patients and we show its application in some experimental protocols. On the same line of reasoning we propose an adaptive training strategy for ataxic patients that again requires the soft interaction of haptic robots.