PT - JOURNAL ARTICLE AU - Christian Giang AU - Elvira Pirondini AU - Nawal Kinany AU - Camilla Pierella AU - Alessandro Panarese AU - Martina Coscia AU - Jenifer Miehlbradt AU - Cécile Magnin AU - Pierre Nicolo AU - Adrian Guggisberg AU - Silvestro Micera TI - Motor improvement estimation and task adaptation for personalized robot-aided therapy: a feasibility study AID - 10.1101/728725 DP - 2019 Jan 01 TA - bioRxiv PG - 728725 4099 - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/08/16/728725.short 4100 - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2019/08/16/728725.full AB - Background In the past years, robotic systems have become increasingly popular in both upper and lower limb rehabilitation. Nevertheless, clinical studies have so far not been able to confirm superior efficacy of robotic therapy over conventional methods. The personalization of robot-aided therapy according to the patients’ individual motor deficits has been suggested as a pivotal step to improve the clinical outcome of such approaches.Methods Here, we present a model-based approach to personalize robot-aided rehabilitation therapy within training sessions. The proposed method combines the information from different motor performance measures recorded from the robot to continuously estimate patients’ motor improvement for a series of point-to-point reaching movements in different directions and comprises a personalization routine to automatically adapt the rehabilitation training. We engineered our approach using an upper limb exoskeleton and tested it with seventeen healthy subjects, who underwent a motor-adaptation paradigm, and two subacute stroke patients, exhibiting different degrees of motor impairment, who participated in a pilot test.Results The experiments illustrated the model’s capability to differentiate distinct motor improvement progressions among subjects and subtasks. The model suggested personalized training schedules based on motor improvement estimations for each movement in different directions. Patients’ motor performances were retained when training movements were reintroduced at a later stage.Conclusions Our results demonstrated the feasibility of the proposed model-based approach for the personalization of robot-aided rehabilitation therapy. The pilot test with two subacute stroke patients further supported our approach, while providing auspicious results for the applicability in clinical settings.Trial registration This study is registered in ClinicalTrials.gov (NCT02770300, registered 30 March 2016, https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT02770300).MIMotor improvementMVMovement velocitySALSpectral arc lengthSUCCSuccessFMA-UEFugl-Meyer assessment for upper extremities