Collaborative tele-rehabilitation and robot-mediated therapy for stroke rehabilitation at home or clinic

Successful home-rehabilitation should reduce cost, facilitate virtual therapeutic visits, and motivate stroke survivors to engage in under-supervised therapeutic activity at levels necessary for motor learning and generalization to occur. We explored long-distance collaborative "play" using two 6DOF robot-mediated environments and examined the influence on the motivation of able-bodied persons to engage in therapy, sustain play, and relate during a shared task, tic-tac-toe. A clear positive trend existed in favor of the collaborative robot-mediated environment, which subjects found more valuable, interesting, and enjoyable, and was therefore willing to spend more time at the task. Kinematic metrics such as mean velocity of movement and movement smoothness were sensitive to the changes in the level of collaboration in the environment in that sub-movements from rest to the piece were slower and less directed than movements to place the piece at the target tic-tac-toe location. We discuss our experiment, results and its application to stroke rehabilitation and to the development of collaborative tele-rehabilitation at home.