The use of robotics devices in knee rehabilitation: a critical review

Abstract

Knee surgery is a common procedure to treat cartilage defects, soft tissue lesions as cruciate ligaments (ACL/PCL), and osteoarthritis with total or unicondylar knee arthroplasty. After knee surgery, every patient undergoes a long period of rehabilitation (typically from 6 weeks to 6 months) consisting of long sessions of physiotherapy and medical training therapy carried out by qualified personnel. This procedure is long and expensive, and may cause work-related pathologies to physiotherapists. Fortunately, it is generally agreed that robotics may benefit to both patients and physiotherapists due to its ability to repeat tasks with accuracy and its potential to measure the progress of the rehabilitation. This paper aims at providing a critical review of the different proposed robotic solutions and the associated rehabilitation techniques for the knee in particular and for the lower limb in general, with the sake of highlighting the pros and cons and to identify possible promising directions of research.

Exploring Human–Exoskeleton Interaction Dynamics: An In-Depth Analysis of Knee Flexion–Extension Performance across Varied Robot Assistance–Resistance Configurations

“…A powerful resource that has been increasingly used in the rehabilitation process are exoskeletons robots: wearable robots that can help in the treatment by including forces to assist or resist movement, just like a therapist. Such devices can contribute to a reduction in the therapist workload, time, and costs of the treatment as well as to promote objective prognoses through the data collected with their sensors [ 6 ].…”

Design of integral backstepping controller - sliding mode along with admittance controller of knee joint robot in the presence of noise

“…Outerwear robots have wide applications, including physiotherapy and rehabilitation, military, load carrying applications. In recent years, the use of robots in medical applications, especially rehabilitation, has increased [1]. Rehabilitation and training of people with disabilities and other motor disabilities has become a social problem that needs to be solved, although manual therapy, which mainly relies on the experience of the therapist, makes rehabilitation work difficult in long-term treatments and training with high repetitions.…”

“…Figure 2 The studied system includes the robot arm and the patient's leg (right side), the free diagram of the system (left side). According to Figure 2, the dynamic equations of the robot arm will be in the form of equation (1).…”

Application of Electromyography in Rehabilitation Devices

“…Achieving human machine compliance is the main objective in rehabilitation robotics. Not only does having a good compliance helps to achieve a better assistance in activities of daily living, but in turn also aids in faster recovery of the patients [1]. Older generations of rehabilitation robots rely on traditional user interfaces such as joysticks, etc., which are generally difficult for the user to control.…”