Study on the standardization of the evaluation method for rehabilitation robots

Abstract

These days, many rehabilitation robots are used in clinical practice In order to prove the effectiveness and safety of rehabilitation robots, it is necessary to standardize the method used to evaluate rehabilitation using robots. The purpose of this research is to create evaluation standards for rehabilitation using robots and to standardize them. In preparing evaluation criteria for rehabilitation that uses robots, the candidate evaluation items were objectively collected from past articles and academic abstracts These items were classified into clinical evaluation items, economic evaluation items, safety evaluation items, and evaluation items related to engineering development. For the first questionnaire survey, we divided the evaluation items into “upper limbs”, “trunk + lower limbs”, and asked about “measurement experience”, “usefulness”, “difficulty of measurement” and so on This questionnaire was carried out at 63 facilities in Japan which are using rehabilitation robots Based on the results of the first questionnaire, we carried out a second questionnaire survey and selected what seemed to be useful from among the collected evaluation items Furthermore, we used the selected evaluation items in clinical practice and verified their practicality. As a result of the questionnaire survey, 27 items of “upper limbs” and 34 items of “trunk + lower limbs” were selected The validity of the selected evaluation items was also verified However, there were some problems such as: expensive evaluation tools are required, a large amount of time and labor for evaluation is required, and the sensitivity to rehabilitation using robots is low. We conducted a questionnaire survey to standardize the evaluation of rehabilitation using robots and selected evaluation items that seemed useful. We would like to increase the number of cases, narrow down useful evaluation items, and aim for standardization of the evaluation items for rehabilitation robots.