Long-Term Social Human-Robot Interaction for Neurorehabilitation: Robots as a Tool to Support Gait Therapy in the Pandemic.

Nathalia Céspedes,Marcela Múnera,Denniss Raigoso,Carlos A Cifuentes

doi:10.3389/fnbot.2021.612034

Nathalia Céspedes, Marcela Múnera + Show 2 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3389/fnbot.2021.612034

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Abstract

COVID-19 pandemic has affected the population worldwide, evidencing new challenges and opportunities for several kinds of emergent and existing technologies. Social Assistive Robotics could be a potential tool to support clinical care areas, promoting physical distancing, and reducing the contagion rate. In this context, this paper presents a long-term evaluation of a social robotic platform for gait neurorehabilitation. The robot's primary roles are monitoring physiological progress and promoting social interaction with human distancing during the sessions. A clinical validation with ten patients during 15 sessions were conducted in a rehabilitation center located in Colombia. Results showed that the robot's support improves the patients' physiological progress by reducing their unhealthy spinal posture time, with positive acceptance. 65% of patients described the platform as helpful and secure. Regarding the robot's role within the therapy, the health care staff agreed (>95%) that this tool can promote physical distancing and it is highly useful to support neurorehabilitation throughout the pandemic. These outcomes suggest the benefits of this tool to be further implemented in the pandemic.

Highlights

In light of the rapid spread of COVID-19, several healthcare services are looking for strategies to promote physical distancing and enhance healthcare procedures
Within the COVID-19 pandemic, several researchers highlight the use of Social Assistive Robotics (SAR) through two main tasks: (i) monitoring the patients, and (ii) connecting doctors with patients using teleoperation (Aymerich-Franch, 2020; Hollander and Carr, 2020)
The results indicate that patients like to interact with the robot and even suggest integrating them in other rehabilitation scenarios

Summary

Introduction

In light of the rapid spread of COVID-19, several healthcare services are looking for strategies to promote physical distancing and enhance healthcare procedures. The exploration of new technologies to support the general population’s health is studied (Sakel et al, 2020) In this context, Social Assistive Robotics (SAR) can play a critical role in real environments, mainly to promote physical distancing and support the rehabilitation’s continuity. SAR based applications have been developed in multiple clinics (Cifuentes et al, 2020), home-based (Campa and Campa, 2016), and educational (Heerink et al, 2016) areas The outcomes of these studies show positive effects regarding the motivation (Winkle et al, 2018), adherence to medical treatments (Fasola and Mataric, 2010; Heerink et al, 2016), social interaction (Agrigoroaie and Tapus, 2016), among others. Some studies proposed SAR to interact in hospital environments and deal with mental health and well-being (Tavakoli et al, 2020)

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