A Helping Arm
Robotic physical therapy is moving toward commercialization
From: Technology Review - Dec 2005 / Jan 2006 - page 29
By: Kevin Bullis

Each year, two million Americans suffer brain injuries or strokes that can
impair their ability to move their limbs. Traditional physical therapy can
help patients compensate for the damage, but many patients tend to reach a
plateau in performance after several weeks.  

Since the early 1990s, however, a few patients have been able to continue
their progress thanks to an experimental robot built for arm rehabilitation.
It never tires, adjusts as the patients improve, and precisely measures and
monitors their performance.  

Now, that machine - plus three similar ones - are moving into large-scale
tests equivalent to late-stage drug trials, the first such trials for
therapeutic robots. 

Run by the Veterans Health Administration, the new clinical study will
involve approximately 200 patients. The randomized trials, set to begin next
year and run for three years in an as-yet-undetermined number of hospitals,
will test the robots head-to-head with traditional therapy.  

Read the entire article at:
http://www.technologyreview.com//wtr_16029,1,p1.html

Links:
Robotic Rehab
http://www.technologyreview.com/Therapeutics/wtr_14749,259,p1.html

Albert Lo
http://www.info.med.yale.edu/neurol/dept/Lo.dwt

Interactive Motion Technologies
http://interactive-motion.com/

Robotic Therapy Systems
http://interactive-motion.com/html/hardware.htm#Robotic%20Therapy%20Systems

Chicago PT
http://www.chicagopt.com/

Hocoma
http://www.hocoma.ch/

Robomedica
http://www.robomedica.com/