Upper-limb kinematic reconstruction during stroke robot-aided therapy

Abstract

The paper proposes a novel method for an accurate and unobtrusive reconstruction of the upper-limb kinematics of stroke patients during robot-aided rehabilitation tasks with end-effector machines. The method is based on a robust analytic procedure for inverse kinematics that simply uses, in addition to hand pose data provided by the robot, upper arm acceleration measurements for computing a constraint on elbow position; it is exploited for task space augmentation. The proposed method can enable in-depth comprehension of planning strategy of stroke patients in the joint space and, consequently, allow developing therapies tailored for their residual motor capabilities. The experimental validation has a twofold purpose: (1) a comparative analysis with an optoelectronic motion capturing system is used to assess the method capability to reconstruct joint motion; (2) the application of the method to healthy and stroke subjects during circle-drawing tasks with InMotion2 robot is used to evaluate its efficacy in discriminating stroke from healthy behavior. The experimental results have shown that arm angles are reconstructed with a RMSE of 8.3 × 10(-3) rad. Moreover, the comparison between healthy and stroke subjects has revealed different features in the joint space in terms of mean values and standard deviations, which also allow assessing inter- and intra-subject variability. The findings of this study contribute to the investigation of motor performance in the joint space and Cartesian space of stroke patients undergoing robot-aided therapy, thus allowing: (1) evaluating the outcomes of the therapeutic approach, (2) re-planning the robotic treatment based on patient needs, and (3) understanding pathology-related motor strategies.

Translational effects of robot-mediated therapy in subacute stroke patients: an experimental evaluation of upper limb motor recovery

“…Many stroke survivors (about 42 million in 2015) ( Vos et al, 2016 ) sustain neurological damage, which is often permanent. Among other impairments, stroke can compromise use of the upper limbs, thereby negatively impacting common daily living activities (ADL) ( Papaleo et al, 2015 ).…”

A Comparative Analysis of 2D and 3D Tasks for Virtual Reality Therapies Based on Robotic-Assisted Neurorehabilitation for Post-stroke Patients

“…That is because this type of devices are able to record kinematic and kinetic data. From this data, useful markers can be extracted to quantify the motor recovery process during the therapy (Volpe et al, 2009; Einav et al, 2011; Bertomeu-Motos et al, 2015; Papaleo et al, 2015). Recently in Norouzi-Gheidari et al (2012), it is shown that the rehabilitation sessions performed with the robotic device get better recovery outcomes than the conventional therapy during the rehabilitation of the upper limb of stroke patients.…”

Estimation of Human Arm Joints Using Two Wireless Sensors in Robotic Rehabilitation Tasks

“…In 2006, Mihelj developed a method to estimate the arm joints through two accelerometers placed onto the upper arm [ 9 ]. Then, Papaleo et al improved this method using a numerical integration through the augmented Jacobian in order to estimate the arm configuration with only one accelerometer [ 10 , 11 ]. This algorithm performs a kinematic reconstruction of the simplified human arm model with seven degrees of freedom (DoFs) assuming that the shoulder is fixed during the therapy.…”