Human-Centered Solutions and Synergies across Robotic and Digital Systems for Rehabilitation

Book excerpt: Rehabilitation – the progressive restoration of lost human functions – must be effective, personalized, clinically compliant and engaging: while obtaining maximum results with minimal allocation of resources, it must be tailored to each patient’s needs, it must comply with the medical protocol, and it must engage the patient to perform the expected exercises/activities. In order to achieve such objectives, interaction technologies offer a wider range of solutions every year: more versatile, more impactful. In this context, robots and digital systems constitute groundbreaking opportunities for innovation in rehabilitation, especially through their adoption of artificial intelligence technologies. For instance, they can work as theranostic machines by means of their capability of collecting and analysing valuable data: through this, they can evaluate the rehabilitation outcome, improve diagnostic processes, and offer new insights on clinical conditions and methodologies while they guide the person in training and re-training procedures.