Abstract
Title: This paper presents a systematic review of robotic devices and therapies for cerebral palsy (CP), trying to shed some light on the present literature on robot-based CP rehabilitation. Background: Recent publications have demonstrated that robot-assisted therapies may constitute an effective tool for the compensation and rehabilitation of the functional skills of people with CP. The most important robotic devices for lower and upper limb rehabilitation were selected, specifying the assisted therapies, experiments done with them, and their results in children with CP. Methods: Scientific articles were obtained by means of an extensive search in electronic databases, primarily PubMed and Scopus. Papers published from the year 2000 to 2015 were considered for inclusion. The search was performed by using the following keywords in combination: robot, Cerebral Palsy, children, and therapies. Moreover, some web pages about CP organizations were used to complete the review. Conclusions: There is still a lack of randomized clinical trials with a representative number of subjects, which makes it difficult to evaluate the impact of robot-based therapy, especially the long-term effects. The inclusion of cognitive aspects into the therapies and the design of virtual scenarios in combination with robotic devices provide promising results.
Highlights
Cerebral palsy (CP) is one of the most common disabilities in childhood and makes heavy demands on families, children, and health, educational, and social services
This paper presents a critical review of the robot-assisted therapies designed for people with CP, focusing on locomotion and manipulation
After reading the full texts, we excluded 81 assessed articles because they didn’t adapt to our final inclusion terms, which were discussed by the heterogeneous group of authors. The result of this was a total of 44 reviewed studies. They were divided in this way: 22 for robot-assisted rehabilitation for the lower limb; 9 included in robot-assisted rehabilitation for the upper limb; 7 in terms of virtual reality (VR) in collaboration with robotic rehabilitation in CP; and 6 in the context of translating the experiments to clinical scenarios
Summary
Cerebral palsy (CP) is one of the most common disabilities in childhood and makes heavy demands on families, children, and health, educational, and social services. From a topographic point of view, depending on how many structures are involved, people with CP could be classified as having Hemiplegia, Paraplegia, Tetraplegia, Diplegia, or Monoplegia This classification, used in combination with the type of movement disorder (Spasticity, Dyskinesia, Ataxia, or Mixed), offers an interesting approach for clinical practice. GMFCS defines five levels of CP depend on functional limitations, the need for hand-held mobility devices (such as walkers, crutches or canes) or wheeled mobility, and to a much lesser extent, quality of movement This bibliography recognizes that the levels of GMFCS are based on age (groups under two years old, between two and four years old, between four and six years old, between six and 12 years old and between 12 and 18 years old)
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