Comprehensive planning of robotic therapy and assessment of task-oriented functions via improved QFD applicable to hand rehabilitation

A successful implementation of any effective rehabilitation process using robotics systems must consider the issues in both clinical and engineering. Although many recent robotics rehabilitation works involve interdisciplinary teams with engineers and clinicians, there seems to be a gap between the engineers and the clinical groups. Useful and important results achieved in the clinical groups are not widely-received in the robotics community. Parts of the reason might lie with the complexity of the unfamiliar clinical topics and practical issues to engineers. On the other hand, many engineering works and results documented do not seem to focus on the crucial clinical problems. To this end, the present work aims to close the gap, as much as we could, by applying clinical aspects to robotics rehabilitation system via an improved quality function deployment (QFD) template based on effective rehabilitation outcome. The objective is to promote and enhance effective hand rehabilitation process by virtue of the proposed programme planning and assessment of hand functionality through clinical trials. The improved QFD template with main components can be extended to other clinical-based robotics rehabilitation works.