Challenges and opportunities for robot-mediated neurorehabilitation

Robot-mediated neurorehabilitation is a rapidly advancing field that seeks to use advances in robotics, virtual realities, and haptic interfaces, coupled with theories in neuroscience and rehabilitation to define new methods for treating neurological injuries such as stroke, spinal cord injury, and traumatic brain injury. The field is nascent and much work is needed to identify efficient hardware, software, and control system designs alongside the most effective methods for delivering treatment in home and hospital settings. This paper identifies the need for robots in neurorehabilitation and identifies important goals that will allow this field to advance

Low-dimensional control: Tonus (63)

In 1963, an article on “Tonus” (tone), written by Nikolai A. Bernstein and Yakov M. Kots. appeared in the second edition of the Bols'aja Medicinskaja Enciclopedija [Grand Medical Encyclopedia]. The paper is now published for the first time in the English language, with Mark L. Latash as translator. In accordance with then contemporary neurophysiology and neuropsychology, the paper presented “tone” as a graded phenomenon (as opposed to all-or-none), serving to prepare the segmental level for phasic contractions. Influenced by Granit and Matthews, the authors proposed that the suprasegmental level controls the threshold and the slope of the stretch reflex. In their introduction to the present edition, the editors understand this proposal in the context of low-dimensional control, that is. control in terms of one or a few variables (as opposed to central commands specifying all the details). Selected episodes from the history of low dimensional control and its logical counterpart, spinal intelligence, are used to illustrate how difficult these ideas were to accept. As so often in new scientific developments, confusion was the rule, and in this respect the paper on “Tonus” is no exception. In the epilogue, Kots gives his personal memories of the context in which the paper was written. At the time, he was working on “equitonometry” (equitonometric), measuring tonic balance with gravity eliminated. Results of equitonometric research quite naturally led to the idea that suprasegmental centers control the threshold and the slope of me tonic stretch reflex. As Kots remembers, that was “no big deal.”</jats:p