Rehabilitation robotics research at the National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research.

The application of robotics to disability and rehabilitation research is fairly recent. This field of research appears to be growing. The National Library of Medicine’s MEDLINE is the largest freely accessible public database of medical literature, with more than 11 million citations from 1960 to the present (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi). The number of publications cited each year in MEDLINE under the medical subject heading “robotics” was minimal until about 1985; after 1985 the number of citations each year began to increase. Between 1960 and 2004, 148 citations were specific to disability and rehabilitation out of 2,957 total robotics citations in MEDLINE. The research productivity in robotics over time is illustrated in Figure 1. Robotics research productivity specific to disability and rehabilitation (Figure 1, left y-axis) appears to have paralleled, at a reduced level, the research productivity in all other aspects of medical robotics (Figure 1, right y-axis). The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) International Conference on Rehabilitation Robotics meets every 2 years. Their ninth