Robot aided therapy: challenges ahead for upper limb stroke rehabilitation

www.isrg.reading.ac.uk People who have been discharged from hospital following a stroke still have a potential to continue their recovery by doing therapy at home. Unfortunately it is difficult to exercise a stroke affected arm correctly and many people simply resort to using their good arm for most activities. This strategy makes many tasks difficult and any tasks requiring two hands become nearly impossible. The use of haptic interface technologies will allow the reach and grasp movements to be retrained by either assisting movement, or directing movement towards a specified target. This paper demonstrates how initial work on machine mediated therapies can be made available to a person recovering at home. 1