PURE – A Partially Unsupervised Rehabilitation Robot for Efficient Therapy
Studies indicate that a higher amount of therapy has to be provided to patients for an increased rehabilitation outcome. Demographic ageing and financial resources of the health care system put a constraint to more intensive therapy if the current technology is used. Robots have the potential to solve this issue by relieving the therapists not only from physical work, but also from rather repetitive and cognitively less demanding tasks. With such robotic tools therapists can effectively train multiple patients in parallel. This will lead to more training time per patient at the same therapist effort.
Involved people
The goal of this project is to find the technological solutions that are needed such that robots can provide effective therapy in partially autonomous operation. We aim to merge these novel technologies in PURE: A Partially Unsupervised Rehabilitation Robot for Efficient Therapy.
To enable robots to provide autonomous training, allow longer training sessions, and an efficient setup following technical challenges have to be solved (see figure): save unsupervised operation, efficient information flow, high patient motivation over long sessions, comfort over longer sessions, automated setup, and high haptic transparency.