Patient Evaluation of an Upper-Limb Rehabilitation Robotic Device for Home Use

Abstract

The paper presents a user study to compare the performance of two rehabilitation robotic systems, called HomeRehab and PupArm. The first one is a novel tele-rehabilitation system for delivering therapy to stroke patients at home and the second one has been designed and developed to provide rehabilitation therapy to patients in clinical settings. Nine patients with different neurological disorders participated in the study. The patients performed 16 movements with each robotic platform and after that they filled a usability survey. Moreover, to evaluate the patient's performance with each robotic device, 8 movement parameters were computed from each trial and for the two robotic devices. Based on the analysis of subjective assessments of usability and the data acquired objectively by the robotic devices, we can conclude that the performance and user experience with both systems are very similar. This finding will be the base of more extensive studies to demonstrate that home-therapy with HomeRehab could be as efficient as therapy in clinical settings assisted by PupArm robot.