Lower-Limb Robotic Rehabilitation: Literature Review and Challenges

This paper presents a survey of existing robotic systems for lower-limb rehabilitation. It is a general assumption that robotics will play an important role in therapy activities within rehabilitation treatment. In the last decade, the interest in the field has grown exponentially mainly due to the initial success of the early systems and the growing demand caused by increasing numbers of stroke patients and their associate rehabilitation costs. As a result, robot therapy systems have been developed worldwide for training of both the upper and lower extremities. This work reviews all current robotic systems to date for lower-limb rehabilitation, as well as main clinical tests performed with them, with the aim of showing a clear starting point in the field. It also remarks some challenges that current systems still have to meet in order to obtain a broad clinical and market acceptance.