Editorial: Robot-assisted rehabilitation for neurological disorders

Abstract

The mortality rate of people with neurological disorders, such as stroke, Parkinson's disease, spinal cord injury, cerebral palsy, multiple sclerosis is decreasing due to advancements in medical research, as mentioned for example in (Gonçalves et al., 2012;Gonçalves et al., 2016). However, neurological disorders can result in long-term disabilities and significant improvements are still required for cost and time-effective recovery of neurological functions such as discussed in (Goncalves et al., 2017). In recent years, research on rehabilitation robotics has progressed from proposing solutions for the clinical field to more portable solutions tailored to the user's requirements. However, more efforts are still needed in the development of robotic solutions for neurological rehabilitation that are accessible to a large number of patients as outlined in multiple works such as, for example,

Robotic systems for upper-limb rehabilitation in multiple sclerosis: a SWOT analysis and the synergies with virtual and augmented environments

“…The extraordinary growth of robotic applications to rehabilitation has offered multiple solutions for the most demanding issues of people with disabilities ( Carbone and Gonçalves, 2022 ; Pierella and Micera, 2022 ; Sadeghnejad et al, 2023 ). Among these challenges, we can find the impairments caused by Multiple Sclerosis (MS), a complex disorder of the central nervous system, showing a spectrum of sensory, motor, autonomic, and cognitive difficulties that severely affect a person’s capability to perform several Activities of Daily Living (ADLs) ( Dobson and Giovannoni, 2019 ; Lublin et al, 2022 ).…”