Robot-assisted gait training

There is increasing interest in using robotic devices to provide rehabilitation therapy following neurological injuries. During robotic gait training, patients are assisted with body-weight support and provided with physical guidance from a robotic device to move their legs into a correct gait pattern. Gait rehabilitation robots allow for longer training duration, promote more movement repetitions, improve patient safety and motivation, reduce the therapists' burden, and eventually improve the therapeutic outcome. This chapter introduces the rationale of robot-assisted gait training and follows with an overview of existing gait rehabilitation robots and their control strategies. It finishes with a summary of existing clinical trials, which showed that training with robotic rehabilitation devices is, at least, as effective as conventional physiotherapy. It concludes with the recommendation that further clinical studies are required in order to define the most appropriate robotic technical features based on the type of rehabilitation tasks, patients' neurological injuries, and their stage of recovery