Rehabilitation Robotics

Abstract

Rehabilitation robotics is a combination of industrial robotics and medical rehabilitation, which encompasses many areas including mechanical, electrical, and biomedical engineering, prosthetics, autonomous mobility, artificial intelligence, and sensor technology (Prior and Warner, 1990). The success of robotics in the industrial arena opens up opportunities to significantly improve the quality of life of people with disabilities, including integration into employment, therapy augmentation, and so on. These opportunities could be realized to the full, provided rehabilitation robotic systems can be developed to meet the needs of people with disabilities in their daily living activities. Rehabilitation robotics can be categorized mainly as three kinds: mobility aids, manipulation aids, and therapeutic robots.