Cooperative and active assistance based interactive therapy

The control of a rehabilitation robot for stroke should be designed to promote active participation of patients in the therapy process. This goal can be achieved by performance based assistance control to provide assistance only when needed and where it is needed. This control philosophy is implemented on Robot for Upper Extremity Repetitive Therapy (RUPERT), a wearable robotic exoskeleton powered by pneumatic muscle actuators. Therapy of stroke survivors under this control using RUPERT has been carried out on 6 patients. Some preliminary analysis of the performance outcome after the therapy is presented in this report. The result is promising though a controlled study has to be done to illustrate the real advantage of the adaptive performance based control.