Socially Interactive Robot for Motor Rehabilitation Therapies with Paediatric Patients

Motor rehabilitation therapy pursuits the recovery of damaged areas from the repetitive practice of certain motor activities. The patient's recovery directly depends on the adherence to rehabilitation therapy. Conventional methods consisting of repetitions usually make the patient feel unmotivated and neglect complying with the appropriate treatments. In addition, the treatment of these motor deficits requires intensive and extended rehabilitation sessions that demand sustained dedication and effort by professionals and incur in accretive costs for the institutions. Within this framework, this paper describes the development and evaluation of a new neurorehabilitation therapy, whose core is a socially interactive robot. This robot is able to consistently engaged patients in the therapeutic interaction, providing tireless motivation, encouragement and guidance. The experience has also been the origin of the design and implementation of a novel control architecture, ROBOCOG, which has provided the robot perceptual and cognitive capabilities that allow a behavior more socially developed, proactive. Verification tests carried out on the various components of the architecture show us the proper working of these and its integration with the rest of the architecture. Furthermore, this therapy has been successfully with congenital brachial palsy (PBO), a disease caused by damage acquired at birth and affects motor mobility of the upper limbs, but not their intellectual and communicative abilities.