Goal-directed Generation of Exercise Sets for Upper-Limb Rehabilitation

A rehabilitation therapy usually derives from general goals set by the medical expert, who requests the patient to attend sessions during a certain time period in order to help him regaining mobility, strength and/or flexibility. The therapist must transform these general goals manually into a set of exercises distributed over different rehabilitation sessions that compose the complete therapy plan, taking into account the patient clinical conditions and a predetermined session and therapy time. This becomes a hard task and might lead to rigid schedules which not always accomplish the desired achievement level of therapeutic objectives established by the physician and could have a negative impact on the patients’ engagement in the therapy. Classical and Hierarchical Task Network planning approaches have been used in this paper to compare the modelling and results of both domain formulations for the automatic generation of therapy plans for patients suffering obstetric brachial plexus palsy, in response to a given set of therapeutic objectives.