Rehabilitation aims to ameliorate deficits in motor control via intensive practice with the affected limb. Current strategies, such as one-on-one therapy done in rehabilitation centers, have limitations such as treatment frequency and intensity, cost and requirement of mobility. Thus, a promising strategy is home-based therapy that includes task specific exercises. However, traditional rehabilitation tasks may frustrate the patient due to their repetitive nature and may result in lack of motivation and poor rehabilitation. In this article, we propose the design and verification of an effective upper extremity rehabilitation game with a tangible robotic platform named Cellulo as a novel solution to these issues. We first describe the process of determining the design rationales to tune speed, accuracy and challenge. Then we detail our iterative participatory design process and test sessions conducted with the help of stroke, brachial plexus and cerebral palsy patients (18 in total) and 7 therapists in 4 different therapy centers. We present the initial quantitative results, which support several aspects of our design rationales and conclude with our future study plans.

The Cellulo robots are small tangible robots that are designed to represent virtual interactive point-like objects that reside on a plane within carefully designed learning activities. In the context of these activities, our robots not only display autonomous motion and act as tangible interfaces, but are also usable as haptic devices in order to exploit, for instance, kinesthetic learning. In this article, we present the design and analysis of the haptic interaction module of the Cellulo robots. We first detail our hardware and controller design that is low-cost and versatile. Then, we describe the task-based experimental procedure to evaluate the robot's haptic abilities. We show that our robot is usable in most of the tested tasks and extract perceptive and manipulative guidelines for the design of haptic elements to be integrated in future learning activities. We conclude with limitations of the system and future work.

Building over algorithms previously developed for digital pens, this article introduces a novel 2D localization technique for mobile robots, based on simple printed patterns. This method combines high absolute accuracy (below 0.3mm), unlimited scalability, low computational requirements (the presented open-source implementation runs at above 45Hz on a low-cost microcontroller) and low cost (below 30 per device at prototype stage). The article first presents the underlying algorithms and localization pipeline. It then describes our reference hardware and software implementations, and finally evaluates the performance of this technique for mobile robots.

In this article we investigate the role of interactive haptic-enabled tangible robots in supporting the learning of cursive letter writing for children with attention and visuomotor coordination issues. We focus on the two principal aspects of handwriting that are linked to these issues: Visual perception and visuomotor coordination. These aspects, respectively, enhance two features of letter representation in the learner's mind in particular, namely the shape (grapheme) and the dynamics (ductus) of the letter, which constitute the central learning goals in our activity. Building upon an initial design tested with 17 healthy children in a preliminary school, we iteratively ported the activity to an occupational therapy context in 2 different therapy centers, in the context of 3 different summer school camps involving a total of 12 children having writing difficulties. The various iterations allowed us to uncover insights about the design of robot-enhanced writing activities for special education, specifically highlighting the importance of ease of modification of the duration of an activity as well as of adaptable frequency, content, flow and game-play and of providing a range of evaluation test alternatives. Results show that the use of robot-assisted handwriting activities could have a positive impact on the learning of the representation of letters in the context of occupational therapy (V = 1, 449, p < 0.001, r = 0.42). Results also highlight how the design changes made across the iterations affected the outcomes of the handwriting sessions, such as the evaluation of the performances, monitoring of the performances, and the connectedness of the handwriting.