abstract
- The proposed work was developed under the Smart Health project, which aims to advance the upper body rehabilitation by offering a robotic alternative to reduce the limitations of physical therapy, providing more intensive and personalized therapy sessions for patients. The use of robots allows on the one hand to relieve therapists from laborious and repetitive tasks, and on the other hand to relieve rehabilitation centers with more affordable sessions. The proposed strategy is to develop a new python-based software that controls the robot, collects the patient’s forces and muscle activity in real time and store them for future analysis, while providing visual feedback, thus allowing to optimize the sessions. These features allow the physiotherapist to have an objective perception of the patient’s performance during the exercise. This solution is implemented in robots already commercialized in the industrial field, which are generally mass-produced in production lines at a relatively low cost and with great flexibility.