Experimental Study on Upper-Limb Rehabilitation Training of Stroke Patients Based on Adaptive Task Level: A Preliminary Study

Abstract

During robot-aided motion rehabilitation training, inappropriate difficulty of the training task usually leads the subject becoming bored or frustrated; therefore, the difficulty of the training task has an important influence on the effectiveness of training. In this study, an adaptive task level strategy is proposed to intelligently serve the subject with a task of suitable difficulty. To make the training task attractive and continuously stimulate the patient's training enthusiasm, diverse training tasks based on grabbing game with visual feedback are developed. Meanwhile, to further enhance training awareness and inculcate a sense of urgency, a dynamic score feedback method is used in the design of the training tasks. Two types of experiments, functional and clinical rehabilitation experiments, were performed with a healthy adult and two recruited stroke patients, respectively. The experimental results suggest that the proposed adaptive task level strategy and dynamic score feedback method are effective strategies with respect to incentive function and rehabilitation efficacy.

Motivational Strategies for Stroke Rehabilitation: A Descriptive Cross-Sectional Study

“…In addition, Dobkin et al (9) found that praise and positive feedback were effective for improving walking speed in patients with stroke. Thus, the present results are partly consistent with the previous qualitative (2,3,17,18) and experimental reports (9,12,13,34,36) from Western countries. The advantage of this study was that it represents the first extensive survey to quantitatively investigate the actual motivational strategies used in stroke rehabilitation.…”

“…Selfdetermination contributes to the facilitation and maintenance of intrinsic motivation (35). The difficulty of a practice task is thought to have an important impact on the effectiveness of rehabilitation, as inappropriate levels of difficulty can lead the patient to become bored or frustrated (36). Indeed, gradual increases in task difficulty and goal-oriented practice have been recommended to facilitate functional motor recovery during stroke rehabilitation (1).…”

Motivational Strategies for Stroke Rehabilitation: A Delphi Study

“…5 Gradual increases in task difficulty and goal-oriented practice have been recommended to promote functional recovery during stroke rehabilitation. 31 As inappropriate levels of task difficulty can bore or frustrate the patient, 32 the difficulty of a practice task is considered to affect the patient adherence to a rehabilitation program. Setting rehabilitation goals can also have a positive impact on stroke recovery during rehabilitation.…”

A Novel Robot-Aided Upper Limb Rehabilitation Training System Based on Multimodal Feedback

“…In our previous research, a robot-aided upper limb rehabilitation system was constructed, which primarily included the whole arm manipulator (WAM), arm support device, self-developed three-dimensional (3D) force sensor, and controlling personal computer (PC) (Pan et al, 2017(Pan et al, , 2019. The WAM works in a large workspace with four rotational degrees of freedom, and the self-developed 3D force sensor is installed at the endpoint of the WAM to measure the interactive force for use in some of the designed control algorithms, as shown in Figure 1.…”

“…During operation, four driver motor angles can be measured to detect the position of every joint in real time, and the control torque can be set to provide joint control. For detailed information about the hardware and software characteristics of the constructed motion rehabilitation training system, please refer to Pan et al (2017Pan et al ( , 2019. The framework of the rehabilitation control system in this study, which incorporates multimodal feedback, is presented in Figure 2.…”