Rehabotics

The purpose of the Rehabotics project is the development of an integrated platform that integrates robotic systems and assistive technologies for the restoration of hand function in patients with mobility disorders due to brain damage or neurodegenerative disease. The aim is to offer an environment of providing high level of treatment and support services to patients with mobility disorders in the hands, which will take place both in the clinical environment and in the patient’s home through telemedicine applications.

The goal of Rehabotics is multiple:

Objective 1: Faster recovery of functional extremities due to neurological disorder or neurodegenerative disease and reduction of pain due to spasticity.

Objective 2: Creating an innovative medical decision support system that promotes personalized rehabilitation through retraining of motor disorders, therapeutic strengthening exercises, assistive technologies.

Objective 3: Enhance patient-clinician interaction that helps to improve therapeutic outcomes and allows for the automatic adjustment of treatment planning according to patient performance.

Objective 4: Improving the quality of life of patients and their families by implementing a system that allows exercise from home and remote monitoring and significantly reduces the frequency and cost of the need to visit a specialized physiotherapy center.

Objective 5: The improvement of the level of robotics capabilities in the Greek industry as well as in the provision of services aiming at the following characteristics: adaptability, cognitive ability, structurality, autonomy in decision making, flexibility, interaction ability, handling ability, movement ability, perception ability.

Objective 6: The compilation of a feasibility study and a rights study.

Rehabotics is a tele-monitoring platform for patients with spasticity incorporating:

i) a soft glove with specialized sensors,

ii) an active hand exoskeleton,

iii) an interactive virtual environment,

iv) a cloud platform acting as DSS support tool

 

Softglove with sensors

Softglove

Active Exoskeleton

Exoskeleton Concept
Exoskeleton Flowchart

The Rehabotics platform will be handled by the clinicians during the pilot and will run locally.

The platform is comprised of three main components:

  • A cpp module which is responsible for the communication with both the glove for data acquisition in real time and also the python module for the transmission of the data to be processed.
  • A python module which provides a graphical user interface (local clinician dashboard) to enable the clinicians to handle the data transmission, recording and necessary calculations during the pilot phase.
  • The serious games’ module which provides the rehabilitation games to the patients.

The developed software provides calculations of already known rehabilitation scales  (e.g. Ashworth scale, passive range of motion (rom), active rom) through the necessary optimized algorithms.

The developed software communicates with the online dashboard through an established REST API, to provide to the online DashBoard the necessary intelligent analytics and raw data for visualization purposes.

 

Rehabotics Dashboard

Rehabotics Dashboard