Multi-patient rehabilitation robotics: more fun and more efficient?

Seminar Speaker: Vesna Novak, University of Cincinnati

Abstract:

Robots have great potential for motor rehabilitation: a person with an impaired limb can be physically supported and guided by the robot as they exercise, enabling longer and more intense exercise. Such robots have classically been used in setups consisting of one patient, one robot, and one therapist. However, allowing patients to exercise together has multiple potential benefits: increased patient motivation from competition and cooperation, the ability to practice interpersonal coordination, and the increased efficiency of having a therapist supervise multiple patients at once. In this talk, I will present several examples of robots and virtual environments for competitive and cooperative exercises, including methods for automated exercise adaptation based on performance or physiology, methods for haptic coupling between participants, and short-term and preliminary long-term results. Finally, I will discuss our NSF-funded work on multi-robot, multi-human environments for rehabilitation.

Biography:

Vesna Novak is an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Cincinnati. She received her diploma and PhD in electrical engineering from the University of Ljubljana in 2008 and 2011, respectively. She was a postdoctoral fellow at ETH Zurich, Switzerland, from 2012 to 2014, and then an Assistant and Associate Professor at the University of Wyoming from 2014 to 2021. Her research interests include rehabilitation robotics, wearable robotics, affective computing, serious games, and human activity recognition. She is currently the Principal Investigator for three NSF grants and a small NIH grant, and has authored 41 peer-reviewed international journal papers as well as over 50 peer-reviewed conference papers.