How to gain evidence in neurorehabilitation: a personal view

Neurorehabilitation is an emerging field driven by developments in neuroscience and biomedical engineering. Most patients that require neurorehabilitation have had a stroke, but other diseases of the brain, spinal cord, or nerves can also be alleviated. Modern therapies in neurorehabilitation focus on reducing impairment and improving function in daily life. As compared with acute care medicine, the clinical evidence for most neurorehabilitative treatments (modern or conventional) is sparse. Clinical trials support constraint-induced movement therapy for the arm and aerobic treadmill training for walking, both high-intensity interventions requiring therapist time (i.e., cost) and patient motivation. Promising approaches for the future include robotic training, telerehabilitation at the patient's home, and supportive therapies that promote motivation and compliance. It is argued that a better understanding of the neuroscience of recovery together with results from small-scale and well-focused clinical experiments are necessary to design optimal interventions for specific target groups of patient

Augmented visual, auditory, haptic, and multimodal feedback in motor learning: A review

It is generally accepted that augmented feedback, provided by a human expert or a technical display, effectively enhances motor learning. However, discussion of the way to most effectively provide augmented feedback has been controversial. Related studies have focused primarily on simple or artificial tasks enhanced by visual feedback. Recently, technical advances have made it possible also to investigate more complex, realistic motor tasks and to implement not only visual, but also auditory, haptic, or multimodal augmented feedback. The aim of this review is to address the potential of augmented unimodal and multimodal feedback in the framework of motor learning theories. The review addresses the reasons for the different impacts of feedback strategies within or between the visual, auditory, and haptic modalities and the challenges that need to be overcome to provide appropriate feedback in these modalities, either in isolation or in combination. Accordingly, the design criteria for successful visual, auditory, haptic, and multimodal feedback are elaborate

Development and evaluation of a haptic framework supporting telerehabilitation robotics and group interaction

Telerehabilitation robotics has grown remarkably in the past few years. It can provide intensive training to people with special needs remotely while facilitating therapists to observe the whole process. Telerehabilitation robotics is a promising solution supporting routine care which can help to transform face-to-face and one-on-one treatment sessions that require not only intensive human resource but are also restricted to some specialised care centres to treatments that are technology-based (less human involvement) and easy to access remotely from anywhere. However, there are some limitations such as network latency, jitter, and delay of the internet that can affect negatively user experience and quality of the treatment session. Moreover, the lack of social interaction since all treatments are performed over the internet can reduce motivation of the patients. As a result, these limitations are making it very difficult to deliver an efficient recovery plan. This thesis developed and evaluated a new framework designed to facilitate telerehabilitation robotics. The framework integrates multiple cutting-edge technologies to generate playful activities that involve group interaction with binaural audio, visual, and haptic feedback with robot interaction in a variety of environments. The research questions asked were: 1) Can activity mediated by technology motivate and influence the behaviour of users, so that they engage in the activity and sustain a good level of motivation? 2) Will working as a group enhance users’ motivation and interaction? 3) Can we transfer real life activity involving group interaction to virtual domain and deliver it reliably via the internet? There were three goals in this work: first was to compare people’s behaviours and motivations while doing the task in a group and on their own; second was to determine whether group interaction in virtual and reala environments was different from each other in terms of performance, engagement and strategy to complete the task; finally was to test out the effectiveness of the framework based on the benchmarks generated from socially assistive robotics literature. Three studies have been conducted to achieve the first goal, two with healthy participants and one with seven autistic children. The first study observed how people react in a challenging group task while the other two studies compared group and individual interactions. The results obtained from these studies showed that the group interactions were more enjoyable than individual interactions and most likely had more positive effects in terms of user behaviours. This suggests that the group interaction approach has the potential to motivate individuals to make more movements and be more active and could be applied in the future for more serious therapy. Another study has been conducted to measure group interaction’s performance in virtual and real environments and pointed out which aspect influences users’ strategy for dealing with the task. The results from this study helped to form a better understanding to predict a user’s behaviour in a collaborative task. A simulation has been run to compare the results generated from the predictor and the real data. It has shown that, with an appropriate training method, the predictor can perform very well. This thesis has demonstrated the feasibility of group interaction via the internet using robotic technology which could be beneficial for people who require social interaction (e.g. stroke patients and autistic children) in their treatments without regular visits to the clinical centres

Technology assessment of advanced automation for space missions

Six general classes of technology requirements derived during the mission definition phase of the study were identified as having maximum importance and urgency, including autonomous world model based information systems, learning and hypothesis formation, natural language and other man-machine communication, space manufacturing, teleoperators and robot systems, and computer science and technology

An Original Approach for a Better Remote Control of an Assistive Robot

Many researches have been done in the field of assistive robotics in the last few years. The first application field was helping with the disabled people\\u27s assistance. Different works have been performed on robotic arms in three kinds of situations. In the first case, static arm, the arm was principally dedicated to office tasks like telephone, fax... Several autonomous modes exist which need to know the precise position of objects. In the second configuration, the arm is mounted on a wheelchair. It follows the person who can employ it in more use cases. But if the person must stay in her/his bed, the arm is no more useful. In a third configuration, the arm is mounted on a separate platform. This configuration allows the largest number of use cases but also poses more difficulties for piloting the robot. The second application field of assistive robotics deals with the assistance at home of people losing their autonomy, for example a person with cognitive impairment. In this case, the assistance deals with two main points: security and cognitive stimulation. In order to ensure the safety of the person at home, different kinds of sensors can be used to detect alarming situations (falls, low cardiac pulse rate...). For assisting a distant operator in alarm detection, the idea is to give him the possibility to have complementary information from a mobile robot about the person\\u27s activity at home and to be in contact with the person. Cognitive stimulation is one of the therapeutic means used to maintain as long as possible the maximum of the cognitive capacities of the person. In this case, the robot can be used to bring to the person cognitive stimulation exercises and stimulate the person to perform them. To perform these tasks, it is very difficult to have a totally autonomous robot. In the case of disabled people assistance, it is even not the will of the persons who want to act by themselves. The idea is to develop a semi-autonomous robot that a remote operator can manually pilot with some driving assistances. This is a realistic and somehow desired solution. To achieve that, several scientific problems have to be studied. The first one is human-machine-cooperation. How a remote human operator can control a robot to perform a desired task? One of the key points is to permit the user to understand clearly the way the robot works. Our original approach is to analyse this understanding through appropriation concept introduced by Piaget in 1936. As the robot must have capacities of perceptio

Improving the skills of forest harvester operators

Forestry suffers from a shortage of trained machine operators, which jeopardises efficient and productive operations. Extensive training is required to skilfully master the complex tasks of operators of forest harvesters and forest forwarders. Therefore, the digitisation of the industry envisages training and support systems on machines that provide real-time support to operators, both on-site and remotely. The aim of this thesis was to improve training methods and pave the way for the development of future operator support systems, therefore a detailed analysis of harvester operators' work tasks, focussing on motor control skills and cognitive (work)load, was conducted. The work was guided by the following two general research questions, which were systematically answered throughout the studies presented in this thesis. (1) How can training methods for robotic arm operators be improved by analysing performance limiting factors in the bimanual control of the robotic cranes and (2) How can the machine operators be effectively supported with different sensorimotor support systems to ensure high level performance? To this end, a multi-pronged approach using qualitative and quantitative methods was adopted and five scientific studies were carried out. For three quantitative laboratory studies, a multi-joint robotic manipulator was designed and programmed as a simulation environment, which in its basic layout resembles the crane of real forestry machines. To identify the challenges in learning the motor control of such robotic cranes, this work focussed on the joystick control of the individual joints (joint control) or the movement of the tip (end-effector) of the robotic crane. Two experimental studies on the acquisition of operating skills with the two different control schemes, showed that in spite of a gain in mental workload reduction with end-effector control, movement accuracy remains difficult with both control schemes. This refers with joint control to the challenging use of the joints involved in the fine control of the robotic crane and with end-effector control to a general lack of accuracy. In a third study, visual and auditory (sonification) support systems were implemented in the simulation environment and compared for increasing accuracy. Auditory support systems showed higher effectiveness, which depends on initial operator performance level. In summary, this thesis has shown that behavioural analysis at the level of joystick movements and the analysis of crane movements can be very fruitful for studying the development of human control skills and deriving new performance indicators that can be used in operator training and the design of different operator support systems. The development of machines with increasing technical operator support will potentially lead to new challenges in real-world operation, where the management of cognitive workload and the detrimental effects, specifically of cognitive underload conditions, will require a rethinking and design of the operators’ work

Passive Motion Paradigm: An Alternative to Optimal Control

In the last years, optimal control theory (OCT) has emerged as the leading approach for investigating neural control of movement and motor cognition for two complementary research lines: behavioral neuroscience and humanoid robotics. In both cases, there are general problems that need to be addressed, such as the “degrees of freedom (DoFs) problem,” the common core of production, observation, reasoning, and learning of “actions.” OCT, directly derived from engineering design techniques of control systems quantifies task goals as “cost functions” and uses the sophisticated formal tools of optimal control to obtain desired behavior (and predictions). We propose an alternative “softer” approach passive motion paradigm (PMP) that we believe is closer to the biomechanics and cybernetics of action. The basic idea is that actions (overt as well as covert) are the consequences of an internal simulation process that “animates” the body schema with the attractor dynamics of force fields induced by the goal and task-specific constraints. This internal simulation offers the brain a way to dynamically link motor redundancy with task-oriented constraints “at runtime,” hence solving the “DoFs problem” without explicit kinematic inversion and cost function computation. We argue that the function of such computational machinery is not only restricted to shaping motor output during action execution but also to provide the self with information on the feasibility, consequence, understanding and meaning of “potential actions.” In this sense, taking into account recent developments in neuroscience (motor imagery, simulation theory of covert actions, mirror neuron system) and in embodied robotics, PMP offers a novel framework for understanding motor cognition that goes beyond the engineering control paradigm provided by OCT. Therefore, the paper is at the same time a review of the PMP rationale, as a computational theory, and a perspective presentation of how to develop it for designing better cognitive architectures