Assessment of upper limb movement with an autonomous robotic device in a school environment for children with Cerebral Palsy

Abstract

Robotic devices are becoming more prevalent in rehabilitation of neurological disorders. Studies focus on clinical measures alongside robotic intervention, but assessment data can be collected as the subjects are using the rehabilitation device. As part of an autonomous robotic rehabilitation device in primary schools, this paper introduces an assessment tool that can engage subjects and measure performance on a more granular scale across an 8 week intervention. The deployments are split in to two parts of single and dual use with a 4 week washout period in-between. Analysis of the scores achieved on the assessment task show improvement on the rehabilitation system, and the data can also be used as part of an adaptive algorithm for the robotic assistance. The data on this pilot study with 11 children with Cerebral Palsy shows that the assessment task can pick up trends of improvement across the deployments. Although the data is noisy, there is significant difference over the washout period, which shows that improvement is maintained after rehabilitation training. The order of single and dual use of the device did not influence the improvement. The simplicity of the assessment tasks makes implementation easy, and collects enough data over a short period of time for significant changes.

Devices and Protocols for Upper Limb Robot-Assisted Rehabilitation of Children with Neuromotor Disorders

“…More specifically, in the first group, the NJIT-RAVR has been used to evaluate the hand movement speed, movement duration, smoothness and range of motion [67][68][69]; the WristBot and the reHaptic Handle have been used to quantify the maximum range of motion of the wrist [49,70,71]; the InMotion2 and REAPlan devices have been used to evaluate the straightness, speed and smoothness of trajectories in specific reaching activities [15,24]; and additionally, InMotion2 has also been used in a multi-joint planar task requiring coordination of the shoulder and elbow joint in order to assess the upper limb motor performance after injections of botulinum toxin type A (BTX-A) in children with hemiplegia due to CP or ABI [64]. Moreover, the MyPam robot has been used to evaluate motor performance in reaching tasks, demonstrating neurological enhancement through maintaining and improving motor skills in the washout period after robotic training in children with CP [50].…”

“…The color filling the circular areas indicates the number of clinical studies performed in the specific locations. The robot selected are:KINARM[46]; ACT3D[47]; NJIT-RAVR[48]; reHaptic Handle[49]; MyPam[50]; REAPlan[15]; ChARMin[51]; Armeo Spring[44]; PASCAL[52]; AMADEO[53]; WristBot[54]; InMotion2[45]; IOTA[55]; Novint Falcon[56].…”

“…REAPlan[15] is a planar end-effector device with 2 DoFs and intended for the rehabilitation of shoulder and elbow; 14. MyPam[50]…”

Hybrid position and orientation tracking for a passive rehabilitation table-top robot

“…During the testing, a humanoid robotic arm, ALAN [11], developed at the University of Leeds, was used to replicate the recorded arm movements of a representative stroke patient playing a rehabilitation game. The patient trajectory data utilized was collected during a trial of the MyPAM system, an active home-based rehabilitation robot also developed at the University of Leeds [12]. A sample data set was chosen belonging to an 81 year old female who was 132 days post-stroke at the time of recruitment to the aforementioned trial.…”