Preliminary feasibility study of the H-Man planar robot for quantitative motor assessment

Abstract

Current robotic rehabilitation devices have a high cost-to-benefit ratio, which prevents their large scale adoption by the clinical rehabilitation community. This paper first presents H-Man, a low cost planar robot, as a quantitative assessment and training tool. This is followed by a preliminary study to investigate baseline performance measures for motor assessment during reaching tasks as a step toward replacing conventional ordinal scales with continuous quantitative scales. Thirteen healthy and one participant with upper limb motor impairment participated in the study and performed reaching tasks with their dominant and non-dominant hands in three directions. The results from healthy subjects indicate no significant difference between different directions for both limbs and also between corresponding directions of dominant and non-dominant limbs (p > 0.05, all cases). However, differences in measures can be observed for the impaired subject.