An adaptive therapy machine for rehabilitating bimanual lifting in hemiplegic stroke patients

Abstract

Specially designed machines, which the authors call rehabilitators, could automate some of the repetitive aspects of physical and occupational therapy. The authors envision developing a family of inexpensive machines, each designed to retrain coordination in a specific activity of daily living, that could be used by physical and occupational therapists. To this end, the authors have built a rehabilitator for adaptively assisting hemiplegic stroke patients in bimanual lifting. The rehabilitator, operating under a simple control law, can adapt properly to two extremes of patient ability: no ability to apply force to an object with the disabled hand, and full ability to lift an object bimanually.<>