Assist-as-Needed Approach for Upper-Limb Robotic Mirror Therapy

Assist-as-needed approaches have shown to be effective in robotic stroke rehabilitation. We here present an assist-as-needed approach for MirA, an upper-limb robotic rehabilitation method based on mirror therapy. We use a bi-manual rehabilitation exoskeleton (ALEx-RS, Wearable robotics) to assist the hemiparetic arm during virtual reality tasks. Our goal is to adapt the assistance based on the movement accuracy of the healthy arm and the participant’s performance. We present data of the exoskeleton’s adaptive assistance in a proof-of-concept test with one healthy subject, demonstrating that the system decreases assistance when the subject performs well and increases it when performance declines.