Kinematics patterns of upper arm reaching movement in robot-mediated therapy

Robot-mediated therapy has been a very dynamic area of research in recent years. It promises improvement in sensorimotor as well as cognitive processes and has several advantages, among them the most important is perhaps the possibility to quantify the performances of the rehabilitation task proposed to the patient. Robotics devices are in fact capable to guide or perturb movements of a patient's limb and can record mechanical quantities such as position, velocity and forces applied. The kinematics quantitative assessments allow to estimate patient's progress, whilst the clinical traditional scales permit only quantitative evaluations. Different systems for robot-aided neurorehabilitation are currently available for upper limb rehabilitation. However, none study indicated a standardized quantitative kinetic evaluation of robot assisted upper arm free reaching three-dimensional movements. In this paper a quantitative kinematic assessment of robot assisted upper arm free reaching movements is proposed. Advised indexes can be useful for describing normal patterns and for implementing and testing rehabilitative strategies patients oriented.