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Upper-limb kinematic reconstruction during stroke robot-aided therapy

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Abstract

The paper proposes a novel method for an accurate and unobtrusive reconstruction of the upper-limb kinematics of stroke patients during robot-aided rehabilitation tasks with end-effector machines. The method is based on a robust analytic procedure for inverse kinematics that simply uses, in addition to hand pose data provided by the robot, upper arm acceleration measurements for computing a constraint on elbow position; it is exploited for task space augmentation. The proposed method can enable in-depth comprehension of planning strategy of stroke patients in the joint space and, consequently, allow developing therapies tailored for their residual motor capabilities. The experimental validation has a twofold purpose: (1) a comparative analysis with an optoelectronic motion capturing system is used to assess the method capability to reconstruct joint motion; (2) the application of the method to healthy and stroke subjects during circle-drawing tasks with InMotion2 robot is used to evaluate its efficacy in discriminating stroke from healthy behavior. The experimental results have shown that arm angles are reconstructed with a RMSE of 8.3 × 10−3 rad. Moreover, the comparison between healthy and stroke subjects has revealed different features in the joint space in terms of mean values and standard deviations, which also allow assessing inter- and intra-subject variability. The findings of this study contribute to the investigation of motor performance in the joint space and Cartesian space of stroke patients undergoing robot-aided therapy, thus allowing: (1) evaluating the outcomes of the therapeutic approach, (2) re-planning the robotic treatment based on patient needs, and (3) understanding pathology-related motor strategies.

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Acknowledgments

This work was partly supported by the European project  H2020/AIDE (CUP J42I15000030006) and the Italian project Industria2015/DAHMS (CUP B85E10003020008).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Laboratory of Biomedical Robotics and Biomicrosystems, Università Campus Bio-Medico di Roma, Rome, Italy

    E. Papaleo, L. Zollo & E. Guglielmelli

  2. Virtual Reality and Robotics Lab, Universidad Miguel Hernandez de Elche, Elche, Spain

    N. Garcia-Aracil, F. J. Badesa & R. Morales

  3. BioRobotics Institute, Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna Pisa, Pisa, Italy

    S. Mazzoleni

  4. Operative Unit of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, Università Campus Bio-Medico di Roma, Rome, Italy

    S. Sterzi

Authors
  1. E. Papaleo
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  2. L. Zollo
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  3. N. Garcia-Aracil
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  4. F. J. Badesa
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  5. R. Morales
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  6. S. Mazzoleni
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  7. S. Sterzi
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  8. E. Guglielmelli
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Correspondence to E. Papaleo.

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Papaleo, E., Zollo, L., Garcia-Aracil, N. et al. Upper-limb kinematic reconstruction during stroke robot-aided therapy. Med Biol Eng Comput 53, 815–828 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11517-015-1276-9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11517-015-1276-9

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