A novel paradigm for patient-cooperative control of upper-limb rehabilitation robots

Early intervention and intensive therapy improve the outcome of neuromuscular rehabilitation. There are indications that where a patient is motivated and premeditates their movement, the recovery is more effective. Therefore, a strategy for patient-cooperative control of rehabilitation devices for upper extremities is proposed and evaluated. The strategy is based on the minimal intervention principle allowing an efficient exploitation of task space redundancies and resulting in user-driven movement trajectories. The patient’s effort is taken into consideration by enabling the machine to comply with forces exerted by the user. The interaction is enhanced through a multimodal display and a virtually generated environment that includes haptic, visual and sound modalities.