Design of a planar robotic machine for telerehabilitation of elderly patients

possibilities for several interventions to promote independent living of impaired elderly people, such as virtual reality and robot-aided tele-rehabilitation. In robot-aided tele-rehabilitation scenarios the patient uses the robot at home while the therapist is supervising the therapy from a remote location. The actual implementation of this methodology asks for the development of novel machines, which should allow the subministration of different therapies, while being easily portable and economically affordable. I.INTRODUCTION arly Supported Discharge (ESD) with continued rehabilitation at home is a well-validated regimen for poststroke rehabilitation [1]. ESD aims at accelerating the patient's discharge by providing at home a level of rehabilitation similar to that allowed in hospitals [2]. Several studies on ESD have recently been published demonstrating a significant effect even in comparison with standard care based in a stroke unit [3]. Decreased length of inpatient rehabilitation stay, greater long-term injury survival rates, broader access to information technologies, and the growing role of the Internet create potential for new models of rehabilitation. In particular, information-based rehabilitation technologies expand the possibilities for numerous interventions to promote independent living of impaired elderly people, such as virtual reality and robot-aided tele-rehabilitation [4]. E Robot-Aided Tele-rehabilitation is a remote rehabilitation where the patient uses the robot at home while the therapist is conducting the therapy from a remote location [5]. The enabling technologies are the Internet, which provides the communication link (data and video), and a robot, which allows the user to input motion commands and receive force feedback. Two possible configurations can be envisaged: (i) in the unilateral configuration only the patient needs to interact with a robot during telerehabilitation [6-8]; (ii) in the bilateral configuration both patient and therapist use robots. In both case a high degree of portability is requested. This means that the robot should be light, compact and robust to be moved to and mounted at the patient's site with no or small need for specialized skills. Moreover, the robot should require few and simple assembly steps in  Manuscript order to shorten the length of the setup procedure, thus allowing the therapy to start as soon as possible. No commercial systems available at the moment fully fulfil these requirements, which should be taken into account from the early design of any robotic system for tele-rehabilitation. This paper presents the design and development of a robot manipulator (called CBM-Motus) for the tele-rehabilitation of the upper limb. The machine …