How Robotics Can Help Speed Up Post-Stroke Rehabilitation

In the United States alone, about 795,000 people suffer strokes each year, leading to varying degrees of paralysis. Post-stroke rehabilitation has come a long way in recent decades and one area of focus is robotic-assisted rehabilitation for both the upper and the lower body. As Physiopedia explains, It is used to supplement or facilitate rehabilitation by assisting in the repetitive labor-intensive manual therapy that is normally administered by therapists. This decreases the time demands on therapists as the robotic devices can help move the patient's limbs during exercises, thereby increasing the amount of therapy for each patient and increasing the number of patients undergoing therapy simultaneously." According to the International Federation of Robotics (IFR), "The advantage of robot devices over rehabilitation exercises guided only by a therapist is that the robot device ensures that the movement is repeated in exactly the same way each time, training the brain to enable muscles to carry out the movements alone.