One-Therapist to Three-Patient Telerehabilitation Robot System for the Upper Limb after Stroke

In this paper, a novel one-therapist to three-patient telerehabilitation robot system is developed, which consists of a web-based server computer for therapist at hospital, three telerehabilitation robots for patients at home or in nursing home, three client computers for robot control, and computer networks connect the client computers to the server computer. A kind of light, back-drivable and safe one degree-of-freedom rehabilitation robot with low cost is designed, and a safe control strategy which is combination of PI control and damping control is proposed for the robot control. Through this telerehabilitation robot system, a therapist can dialogue with post-stroke patients in video communication via the networks, and then he can remotely set or modify the training mode and control parameters of the rehabilitation robots for post-stroke patient training. Haptic based therapy game is also programmed to improve the activity of the patients during training process. Integrated with database management, the history and current performance data of patients acquired by all sensors of the telerehabilitation robot system during the training process are stored and managed. Three volunteer individual patients with upper limb disabilities participated in this study. After four weeks of periodic rehabilitation training with the telerehabilitation robot system, the muscle strength and movement coordination of the three patients had been obviously improved. Our study shows that the one-therapist to three-patient telerehabilitation robot system has good reliability and is able to greatly improve efficiency of the rehabilitation training, which can solve the problem of lack of therapist to a certain extent.