Robotic and Wearable Sensor Technologies for Measurements/Clinical Assessments

Neurological disorders such as stroke, multiple sclerosis, traumatic brain injury, cerebral palsy, or spinal cord injury result in partial or complete sensorimotor impairments in the affected limbs. To provide an optimal rehabilitation program, a detailed assessment of the nature and degree of the sensorimotor deficits, as well as their temporal evolution, is crucial. Valid, reliable, and standardized assessments are essential to define the rehabilitation setting, and adapt it over the course of a therapy. Many clinical assessments suffer from limitations such as poor validity, low reliability, and low sensitivity and are often time consuming to administer, which greatly limits their systematic use in daily clinical routine. Rehabilitation robotics and sensor technologies are promising approaches that can provide objective, sensitive, and reliable measurements, which could help overcome the common limitations of conventional clinical assessments. This chapter focuses on the novel possibilities robotic devices and sensor technologies offer in the field of neurorehabilitation. Different strategies to evaluate sensorimotor impairments using robotic platforms, as well as wearable sensor technologies, are presented. We discuss how a link between conventional scales and robotic/sensor-based assessments could be established and how this could result in more objective, clinically accepted assessment scales. Such scales have the potential to directly influence the way therapy is provided and to generate new insights into long-term recovery and transfer of therapy into performance in the home environment.