SENSORIMOTOR REHABILITATION SYSTEM FOR THE UPPER LIMB WITH VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENT, EXOSKELETON ROBOT, AND REAL OBJECTS

The Sensory Motor Training Station (SMTS), designed to provide concurrent sensorimotor hand and arm training and performance measurement features, incorporates virtual reality, an upper limb robot, and interaction with real objects to provide the nervous system with multimodal sensory experience during movement training. One goal of the SMTS design is to provide training to view, reach, and touch real objects even when the patient is unable to move adequately enough to participate in traditional therapies. Current exercises focus upon concurrent movement and multi-sensory training to improve strategies to recognize arm location and object location to improve prehension, a particularly important skill in activities of daily living and for quality of life in persons with impaired sensory and or motor skills. In a recent experiment, eleven control subjects pointed to virtual targets or viewed and touched real objects in active or passive robot movement conditions while viewing the virtual limb proxy. Viewing and touching the real objects improved performance in an arm location task in both active and passive robot conditions.