Causality-based portable control system design for tele-assessment of elbow joint spasticity

A portable tele-assessment system was developed for remote evaluation of the spastic elbow joint of stroke survivors. The causality-based control architectures were introduced for designing the controllers for the tele-assessment system. Based on causality analysis of the tele-assessment tasks, control architectures were designed to guarantee system stability and to provide the clinician with transparent feeling in the presence of small time delay. The proposed method was verified experimentally on the elbow of healthy subjects. The device was made portable and low cost, which makes it potentially more accessible to patients in remote areas.