Motions Or Muscles? Some Behavioral Factors Underlying Robotic Assistance Of Motor Recovery

Robots provide an excellent platform from which to study recovery at the behavioral level. We reviewed some initial insights about the process of recovering upper-limb behavior that have emerged from our work. For pragmatic reasons, we primarily considered therapy focused on planar arm movements to enable clearer comparison of different forms of therapy (what worked and what did not).

Our investigations indicate that, at least for the upper limb, recovery of the normal pattern of kinematic coordination is preeminent.

Evidence to date suggests that the form of therapy may be more important than its intensity. These results indicate that movement coordination rather than muscle activation may be the most appropriate focus for robotic therapy.