Vision-Assisted Interactive Human-in-the-Loop Distal Upper Limb Rehabilitation Robot and its Clinical Usability Test

Abstract

In the context of stroke rehabilitation, simple structures and user-intent driven actuation are relevant features to facilitate neuroplasticity as well as deliver a sufficient number of repetitions during a single therapy session. A novel robotic treatment device for distal upper limb rehabilitation in stroke patients was developed, and a usability test was performed to assess its clinical feasibility. The rehabilitation robot was designed as a two-axis exoskeleton actuated by electric motors, consisting of forearm supination/pronation and hand grasp/release, which were selected based on a kinematic analysis of essential daily activities. A vision-assisted algorithm was utilized for user-intent extraction in a human-in-the-loop concept. A usability test was performed on six physiatrists, five biomedical engineers, five rehabilitation therapists, two chronic stroke patients, and two caregivers of the patients. After sufficient instruction, all subjects tested the robot for a minimum of 10 min and completed the evaluation form using a 7-point Likert scale. The participants found the device interesting (5.7 ± 1.2), motivating (5.8 ± 0.9), and as having less possibility of causing injury or safety issues (6.1 ± 1.1); however, the appropriateness of difficulty (4.8 ± 1.9) and comfort level (4.9 ± 1.3) were found to be relatively low. Further development of the current device would provide a good treatment option as a simple, low-cost, and clinically feasible rehabilitation robot for stroke.

Retracted: Upper Limb Rehabilitation Robot System Based on Internet of Things Remote Control

“…The lower computer and system status monitoring [23][24][25]. On the other hand, the operation of the lower computer software includes two aspects: on the one hand, it receives the control commands issued by the upper computer, and receives the connection code signal and the boundary switch to form a closed loop control [27][28].…”

Towards a Platform for Robot-Assisted Minimally-Supervised Therapy of Hand Function: Design and Pilot Usability Evaluation

“…In this sense, integrating usability evaluation during the development of rehabilitation technologies was shown to contribute to device design improvements, user satisfaction and device usability (Shah and Robinson, 2007;Power et al, 2018;Meyer et al, 2019). Unfortunately, the usability of robotic devices for upper-limb rehabilitation is only rarely evaluated and documented in the target user population before clinical tests (Pei et al, 2017;Catalan et al, 2018;Guneysu Ozgur et al, 2018;Nam et al, 2019;Tsai et al, 2019).…”

Assessment Methods of Usability and Cognitive Workload of Rehabilitative Exoskeletons: A Systematic Review

“…Ad hoc questionnaires. Reported by six of the selected studies [30][31][32][33][34][35], this type of instrument was most often reported without any evaluation of the dimensionality nor validity nor reliability, as well as with any description of scoring procedures. Therefore, this method was assigned a mean score of 5 out of 17 in our critical appraisal checklist.…”