Developing Robot-Based Cognitive and Motor Tasks for People Living with Both HIV and Stroke

Abstract

There are currently no effective tools to assess the range of physical, cognitive, and social issues seen in the emerging HIV-stroke population. In turn, this poses a barrier to developing effective neurorehabilitation strategies to deal with the unique challenges of living with both HIV and stroke. Rehabilitation robotics provide a potential approach to address this problem. In this study, we develop a cognitive-motor task on the Haptic Theradrive, a single degree-of-freedom robot designed for upper limb rehabilitation. We collect preliminary data on healthy and HIV-stroke subjects from both upper limbs. We identify metrics that could potentially be useful in assessing motor and cognitive impairment across the HIV-stroke disability spectrum.