This paper presents a longitudinal case study of Robot Assisted Therapy for cardiac rehabilitation. The patient, who is a 60-year old male that suffered a myocardial infarction and received angioplasty surgery, successfully recovered after 35 sessions of rehabilitation with a social robot, lasting 18 weeks. The sessions took place directly at the clinic and relied on an exercise regime which was designed by the clinicians and delivered with the support of a social robot and a sensor suite. The robot monitored the patient's progress, and provided personalised encouragement and feedback. We discuss the recovery of the patient and illustrate how the use of a social robot, its sensory systems and its personalised interaction was instrumental to maintain engagement with the programme and to the patient's recovery. Of note is a critical event that was promptly detected by the robot, which allowed fast intervention measures to be taken by the medical staff for the referral of the patient for further surgery.

Social robots are demonstrating to have potential in several health care applications, especially in rehabilitation areas. This paper presents an architecture for a socially assistive robot system for cardiac rehabilitation, based on a model-controller structure through a finite-state machine and a behaviour module. The platform has been designed to provide social support and assistance during the therapy, aiming to improve the quality of the provided service, as well as the engagement and performance of the patients. This architecture has been tested under clinical conditions with a patient during a typical therapy session. The results show that a suitable performance to the different situations presented during the session and providing a robust framework to further develop the robot's behavior towards a more natural and intuitive interaction with patients.

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