Objective. This preliminary study aims to verify if the method of kinematic analysis proposed here may be suitable for evaluating the effects of constraint-induced movement therapy (CIMT) in chronic stroke patients and may be of help in the study of the mechanisms underlying functional improvement following CIMT. Methods. Clinical and kinematic data were collected from a group of chronic stroke patients and from an age-matched healthy control group. Affected and less affected upper-limb kinematics related to hand-to-mouth and reaching movements were acquired before and immediately after 2 weeks of CIMT. Healthy subjects were submitted to kinematic analysis of the nondominant side and reevaluated after 2 weeks. Results. The clinical results were consistent with those reported in the literature and showed motor function improvement of the hemiparetic limb after CIMT. Kinematic data of the healthy control group showed high test-retest reliability. Statistically significant differences between the affected limb and both the less affected limb and the healthy subjects' nondominant limb were observed. After CIMT, kinematic data showed improvement in the speed of movement and in measures related to the capacity for coordination. Conclusions. The method of kinematic analysis was sensitive for an assessment of motor recovery induced by CIMT. The kinematic results suggest that the increase in the use of the paretic limb in activities of daily living after the intervention is not only attributable to the patient's increased attention to it and better hand dexterity, but it is also a consequence of the improved speed of movement and better coordination between shoulder and elbow joints.

Stroke is a leading cause for adult disability, which in many cases causes motor deficits. Despite the developments in motor rehabilitation techniques, recovery of upper limb functions after stroke is limited and heterogeneous in terms of outcomes, and knowledge of important factors that may affect the outcome of the therapy is necessary to make a reasonable prediction for individual patients. In this paper, we assessed the relationship between quantitative electroencephalographic (QEEG) measures and the motor outcome in chronic stroke patients that underwent a robot-assisted rehabilitation program to evaluate the utility of QEEG indices to predict motor recovery. For this purpose, we acquired resting-state electroencephalographic signals from which the power ratio index (PRI), delta/alpha ratio, and brain symmetry index were calculated. The outcome of the motor rehabilitation was evaluated using upper limb section of the Fugl-Meyer Assessment. We found that PRI was significantly correlated with the motor recovery, suggesting that this index may provide useful information to predict the rehabilitation outcome.

The ankle represents a fairly complex bone structure, resulting in kinematics that hinders a flawless robot-assisted recovery of foot motility in impaired subjects. The paper proposes a novel device for ankle-foot neuro-rehabilitation based on a mechatronic redesign of the remarkable Agile Eye spherical robot on the basis of clinical requisites. The kinematic design allows the positioning of the ankle articular center close to the machine rotation center with valuable benefits in term of therapy functions. The prototype, named PKAnkle, Parallel Kinematic machine for Ankle rehabilitation, provides a 6-axes load cell for the measure of subject interaction forces/torques, and it integrates a commercial EMG-acquisition system. Robot control provides active and passive therapeutic exercises.

Upper-limb movement analysis is important to monitor objectively rehabilitation interventions, contributing to improving the overall treatments outcomes. Simple, fast, easy-to-use, and applicable methods are required to allow routinely functional evaluation of patients with different pathologies and clinical conditions. This paper describes the Reaching and Hand-to-Mouth Evaluation Method, a fast procedure to assess the upper-limb motor control and functional ability, providing a set of normative data from 42 healthy subjects of different ages, evaluated for both the dominant and the nondominant limb motor performance. Sixteen of them were reevaluated after two weeks to perform test-retest reliability analysis. Data were clustered into three subgroups of different ages to test the method sensitivity to motor control differences. Experimental data show notable test-retest reliability in all tasks. Data from older and younger subjects show significant differences in the measures related to the ability for coordination thus showing the high sensitivity of the method to motor control differences. The presented method, provided with control data from healthy subjects, appears to be a suitable and reliable tool for the upper-limb functional assessment in the clinical environment.

One of the major issues for the success of assistive robotics concerns the question whether patients not only accept the technology and profit from it, but also whether they can effectively use it. This is especially relevant when patients are highly impaired and present several functional limitations. Therefore, it is important to enable patients to control robots with alternative methods during their activities of daily living. This work deals with the development of a voice control system based on the ROS middleware framework. The voice control was customized on the JACO ² (Kinova Technology, Montreal, QC, Canada), a 6 degree-of-freedom assistive robotic manipulator. Two subjects with different impairments due to a neurodegenerative disease tested the robot for usability controlling it through the JACO ² joystick and the developed voice control system. Both subjects used the voice control system successfully and scored highly its usability. The most impaired subject preferred the voice control while, by contrast, the less impaired one preferred to use the joystick. Preliminary results showed good usability of the system, which could be an important aid for highly impaired people.

This paper presents LIGHTarm, an exoskeleton for the upper-limb neuro-rehabilitation, characterized by a peculiar kinematic structure, expressly conceived to face shoulder rhythm and elbow singularity issues. The device is developed in two versions. The first prototype of this rehabilitation device is unactuated, achieving gravity compensation through a passively mechanically compensated mechanism obtaining a cost-effective and intrinsically safe solution for semi-autonomous training at home. A limitation of passively gravity-compensated devices is that they lack a dynamically and on-line tunable weight-support. Actuated devices, in respect to non-actuated ones, allow “a step further” in the real-time control of tuning the gravity-compensation feature. Starting from its unactuated version, the actuated version is presented, together with the kinematics and dynamics analyses of the mechanism.