Therapy Monitoring and Patient Evaluation with Social Robots

Abstract

Social robots have a great potential. With high movement capabilities and large computational capacity, they allow to perform varied tasks that were usually conducted by humans. One of these tasks are physical therapies, where a therapist guides a patient through the realisation of a set of exercises. A robot, equipped with a sophisticated artificial vision system, can conduct these therapies and evaluate the patient movements. In this paper, we present a system that allows the therapist to design a complete therapy to be carried out by the robot, to start each session with the robot, to evaluate the patient condition over the therapy and to generate reports at the end of a session.