NASA-TLX Assessment for a Haptic Adaptive Platform for Upper Extremity Motor Rehabilitation

Abstract

With the help of platforms with haptic devices, rehabilitation areas for cerebrovascular accident patients can be attended with practices such as upper and lower extremity training. The application of training and/or rehabilitation protocols generates in disabled people the capacity for motor learning (movements executed quickly and accurately through practice). In this research article, we present the integration of a rehabilitation platform for upper limb, which is used by a pilot sample of users, who perform the evaluation of the user’s workload during human-robot interaction using the NASA-TLX protocol, which is based on the assessment of load and mental fatigue. To generate the rehabilitation tasks from trajectory planning in the workspace of the haptic device and guarantee position convergence, a wavenet control (Multiresolution PID control based on wavelet transform and second generation neural networks as identification scheme) was implemented. The proposed adaptive control is evaluated on a 6-degree-of-freedom haptic device with high technological performance (Cyberforce) designed to position an exoskeleton CyberGrasp with the human operator in the loop.