Initial Therapeutic Results of Visual Feedback Manipulation in Robotic Rehabilitation

Visual feedback is provided to patients in most robotic rehabilitation applications, and this feedback has the potential to influence patient performance in therapy. We have explored the use of visual feedback manipulation (by distortion or progression) in rehabilitation with 3 subjects, each of whom participated in a 6-week rehabilitation protocol. Patients' performances during the initial assessment at each therapeutic session were found to be an underestimate of their actual abilities and were a poor metric for setting the difficulty level of therapeutic exercise. All three patients were willing and able to improve their performance by following distortion or progression, and all patients showed functional improvements after participation in the study. Visual feedback manipulation could provide a way to go beyond patients' self-assessment performances, improving the outcome of robotic rehabilitation.