Following cardiac surgery, patients experience difficulties with the rehabilitation process, often finding it difficult, and therefore lack the motivation for rehabilitation activities. As the number of people aged 65 and over will rise by 207 percent globally by 2050, the need for cardiac rehabilitation will significantly increase, as this is the main population to experience heart problems. To address this challenge, this paper proposes a new robotic exoskeleton concept with 12 DoFs (6 DoFs on each arm), with a symmetrical structure for the upper limbs, to be used in the early rehabilitation of cardiac patients after open-heart surgery. The electromechanical design (geometric, kinematic, and dynamic model), the control architecture, and the VR-based operating module of the robotic exoskeleton are presented. To solve the problem of the high degree of complexity regarding the CardioVR-ReTone kinematic and dynamic model, the iterative algorithm, kinetic energy, and generalized forces were used. The results serve as a complete model of the exoskeleton, from a kinematic and dynamic point of view as well as to the selection of the electric motors, control system, and VR motivation model. The validation of the concept was achieved by evaluating the exoskeleton structure from an ergonomic point of view, emphasizing the movements that will be part of the cardiac rehabilitation.

This paper presents a framework for multimodal human-robot interaction. The proposed framework is intended to bring important contributions to the development of human robot interaction to facilitate intuitive programming and to enable easily adapting to changes in robot task without the need of using skilled personnel. The key elements of this system are speech and hand gesture recognition, text programming, and interaction capabilities that allow the user to take over the control of the robot at any given time. Furthermore, our approach is focused on robot tasks. A user can express his/her preference for one or more modalities of interaction so that selected modalities fit user's personal needs.

As the unpredictability of market needs and the mass customization trends increase, employing reconfigurable industrial robotic work cells becomes a viable solution for manufacturers. A reconfigurable manufacturing system is a system designed for a quick change in structure, both in hardware and software, in order to rapidly adjust production capacity and functionalities. However, the approach is quite general; a simple search within scientific literature, patent databases or the world-wide-web returns thousands of results, covering a time period from the 80s to date. Among the results, different approaches on reconfigurable industrial robotic work cell implementations can be easily noticed. This paper surveys the literature in reconfigurable industrial robotic work cells, aiming to identify, besides the most important approaches on this topic, also performance criteria associated to robotic workcell reconfigurability and means of measuring the reconfigurability degree of such cells. The survey also aims to identify command and control architectures used to achieve various levels of reconfigurability. The survey was conducted by using a specific search methodology, which is also presented in the paper.

This article proposes a new, improved home-based cardiac telerehabilitation system enhanced by a robotic and Virtual Reality module for cardiac patients to be used in their rehabilitation program. In this study, a novel strategy was used to integrate existing equipment and applications with newly developed ones, with the aim of reducing the need for technical skills of patients using remote control. Patients with acute or chronic heart diseases require long-term, individualized rehabilitation in order to promote their motor recovery and maintain an active and independent lifestyle. This will be accomplished by creating a system for at-home cardiac telerehabilitation augmented by a VR and cobot systems, which can be used long-term at home by each individual patient. In the pre-feasibility study carried out on healthy volunteers familiar with software applications and robotic systems, we demonstrate that RoboTeleRehab could be technically feasible both hardware and software.

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