A new robotic platform for gait rehabilitation of bedridden stroke patients

Robotic aided therapy has been developed in the last decades in order to improve the effects of gait rehabilitation on stroke patients. Although several platforms have nowadays used in clinical practice, contrasting results have been achieved with reduced significant improvements in stroke patients when they experience robotic based therapy. In particular, an improvement of the clinical outcome may be achieved by starting the rehabilitation process almost immediately after the stroke. To address this issue a new robotic system, called "NEUROBike", has been developed. This approach is based on the hypothesis that a better recovery of the neuro-motor control of the leg could result from an early, intensive and task-oriented rehabilitation therapy. Therefore, the leg manipulation during the acute phase, following joint trajectories comparable with the ones obtained during natural walking, could improve the outcome of the rehabilitation. In this regard, desired trajectories of the end-effector of NEUROBike have been estimated in accordance with data collected from young and elderly people when walking on treadmill in a range of speeds from 0.5 to 1.3 m/s. Moreover, tracking performance of a traditional position control algorithm has been investigated. This paper is aimed at showing the first results obtained during the test of the platform. In the next months NEUROBike will be applied for the first clinical pilot studies.