Robo Rehab
From: MIT's Technology Review Wednesday Update - 04/14/2004

Each year 700,000 people in the United States have a stroke, and more than
half suffer from impaired movement. Their route to recovery is long and
tough, as they painfully relearn how to use an arm or a leg by going through
the motions over and over again with a physical or occupational therapist.
Unfortunately, all that therapist time gets very expensive, and many stroke
victims never recover as well as they might. Enter rehabilitation robots,
which can ease the therapist's load by delivering certain treatments very
efficiently - in some cases achieving dramatically better results than
conventional therapy alone. 

http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/wo_bender041404.asp?trk=nl


Robo Rehab
From: Technology Review - 04/14/2004
By: Eric Bender

Intelligent robotic technology is being employed to help rehabilitate victims
of debilitating strokes, sometimes with better results than traditional
therapy. Rehab robots have been researched for over 10 years, and are
currently being tested on patients in Europe, Asia, and the United States.
Rehab robot providers include Interactive Motion Technologies, whose robots
are based on work by MIT researchers that yielded a robotic arm designed to
help people recover shoulder and elbow movement by repeatedly and tirelessly
guiding their disabled arms through the correct motions, using a video game
to motivate them. Patients using the robot have exhibited twice as much
functional improvement than patients with conventional therapy. Robots can
also adjust physical therapy on the spur of the moment, and MIT researcher
Neville Hogan says that thanks to this ability "we should be able to
accelerate learning by the reward schedule." MIT has partnered with rehab
clinics to carry out trials of new devices that extend the robot arm's scope
to include vertical and wrist motion. Phybotics President Richard Mahoney
notes that research has been lacking in the simultaneous study of recovery
procedures and associated neural activity, but MIT plans to address this
oversight by using magnetic resonance imaging to monitor a patient's brain
activity while he works with the robot arm. Advocates believe robots'
therapeutic applications can include treatment of neurological diseases and
sports medicine, while H.F. Machiel Van der Loos at the U.S. Department of
Veterans Affairs' Palo Alto Rehabilitation Research and Development Center
says personal robots should emerge out of greater understanding of how to
construct machines that interact safely with people. 

http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/wo_bender041404.asp?p=1