A survey on robotic devices for upper limb rehabilitation

After your doctor reviews this there should be some new devices requested for the therapy gym at the hospital. Unless your doctor is a slug, not willing to do anything innovative because that would require learning something new.

11 pages of devices that your doctor should already know about.

http://www.jneuroengrehab.com/content/11/1/3/abstract

Pawe¿ Maciejasz, Jörg Eschweiler, Kurt Gerlach-Hahn, Arne Jansen-Toy and Steffen Leonhardt

Author Affiliations

For all author emails, please log on.

Journal of NeuroEngineering and Rehabilitation 2014, 11:3  doi:10.1186/1743-0003-11-3
Published: 9 January 2014

Abstract (provisional)

The existing shortage of therapists and caregivers assisting physically disabled individuals at home is expected to increase and become serious problem in the near future. The patient population needing physical rehabilitation of the upper extremity is also constantly increasing. Robotic devices have the potential to address this problem as noted by the results of recent research studies. However, the availability of these devices in clinical settings is limited, leaving plenty of room for improvement. The purpose of this paper is to document a review of robotic devices for upper limb rehabilitation including those in developing phase in order to provide a comprehensive reference about existing solutions and facilitate the development of new and improved devices. In particular the following issues are discussed: application field, target group, type of assistance, mechanical design, control strategy and clinical evaluation. This paper also includes a comprehensive, tabulated comparison of technical solutions implemented in various systems.

The complete article is available as a provisional PDF. The fully formatted PDF and HTML versions are in production. 

11 pages of devices that your doctor should already know about.