Robot Assisted Ankle Neuro-Rehabilitation: State of the art and Future Challenges

ABSTRACT

Introduction: Robot-assisted neuro-rehabilitation is gaining acceptability among the physical therapy community. The ankle is one of the most complicated anatomical joints in the human body and neurologic injuries such as stroke often result in ankle and foot disabilities.

Areas covered: Robotic solutions for the ankle joint physical therapy have extensively been researched. Significant research has been conducted on the mechanism design, actuation as well as control of these ankle rehabilitation robots. Also, the experimental evaluations of these robots have been conducted with healthy and neurologically impaired subjects. This paper presents a comprehensive review of the recent developments in the field of robot-assisted ankle rehabilitation. Mechanism design, actuation, and various types of control strategies are discussed. Also, the experimental evaluations of these ankle rehabilitation robots are discussed in the context of the evaluation of robotic hardware with healthy subjects as well as motor function outcomes with neurologically impaired subjects.

Expert opinion: Significant progress in the mechanism design, control, and experimental evaluations of the ankle rehabilitation robots have been reported. However, more sensing and reference trajectory generation methods need to be developed as well as more objective quantitive evaluations that need to be conducted for establishing the clinical significance of these robots.

KEYWORDS:

• Ankle rehabilitation
• robots
• orthosis
• parallel robot
• control strategies
• mechanism design

Article highlights

• A review of ankle rehabilitation robots is provided.

• Mechanism design, actuation, control, and experimental evaluations/assessments of ankle robots are discussed.

• Further research in the field of sensing for human-robot interaction estimation is needed.

• Reference trajectory generation and adaptation methods need to be developed for providing customized robot-assisted ankle rehabilitation.

• More objective quantitive evaluations of the ankle rehabilitation robots are needed for establishing clinical significance.

Declaration of interest

The authors have no other relevant affiliations or financial involvement with any organization or entity with a financial interest in or conflict with the subject matter or materials discussed in this manuscript apart from those disclosed.

Reviewer disclosures

Peer reviewers on this manuscript have no relevant financial or other relationships to disclose.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported in part by the Human-Centred Technology Research Center, University of Canberra, Canberra, ACT, Australia.