Effectiveness of Intelligent Control Strategies in Robot-Assisted Rehabilitation-A Systematic Review.

This review aims to provide a systematic analysis of the literature focused on the use of intelligent control systems in robotics for physical rehabilitation, identifying trends in recent research and comparing the effectiveness of intelligence used in control, with the aim of determining important factors in robot-assisted rehabilitation and how intelligent controller design can improve them. Seven electronic research databases were searched for articles published in the years 2015 - 2022 with articles selected based on relevance to the subject area of intelligent control systems in rehabilitation robotics. It was found that the most common use of intelligent algorithms for control is improving traditional control strategies with optimization and learning techniques. Intelligent algorithms are also commonly used in sensor output mapping, model construction, and for various data learning purposes. Experimental results show that intelligent controllers consistently outperform non-intelligent controllers in terms of transparency, tracking accuracy, and adaptability. Active participation of the patients and lowered interaction forces are consistently mentioned as important factors in improving the rehabilitation outcome as well as the patient experience. However, there are limited examples of studies presenting experimental results with impaired participants suffering limited range of motion, so the effectiveness of therapy provided by these systems is often difficult to quantify. A lack of universal evaluation criteria also makes it difficult to compare control systems outside of articles which use their own comparison criteria.

A novel assessment technique for measuring ankle orientation and stiffness.

The measurement of ankle orientation and stiffness can provide insight into improvements and allows for effective monitoring during a rehabilitation program. Existing assessment techniques have a variety of limitations. Dynamometer based methods rely on manual manipulation. The use of torque meter is usually for single degree-of-freedom (DOF) devices. This study proposes a novel ankle assessment technique that can be used for multiple DOFs devices working in both manual and automatic modes using the position sensor and the multi-axis load cell. As a preliminary evaluation, an assessment device for ankle dorsiflexion and plantarflexion was constructed. Nine subjects participated to evaluate the effectiveness of the assessment device in determining ankle orientation and stiffness. The measured ankle orientation was consistent with that from the NDI Polaris optical tracking system. The measured ankle torque and stiffness compared well with published data. The test-retest reliability was high with intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC2, 1) values greater than 0.846 and standard error of measurement (SEM) less than 1.38.