Robot adaptive behavior to suit patient needs and enable more intensive rehabilitation tasks

The last advances and researches have shown that intensive task-oriented therapy is highly effective for improving the arm function of individuals after stroke, brain injury or other neurological and motor diseases and injuries. This paper studies different control and trajectory planning techniques used on human machine interaction, in order to make a robot behave in a more human compliant way. This work presents a novel method that let the system change its apparent dynamic parameters, by gathering and processing several physiological data online at rehabilitation time. This allows the robot to adapt to different patients and situations, maintaining the therapy as intensive as possible without compromising patients health or let the individual get stressed which would result in a decay of the task performance and loss of motivation.