Team works on robots to help people recover from strokes

The team is working on a three-year project that hopes to develop robotic devices that will facilitate repetitive movement of hands and wrists during the chronic phases of stroke rehabilitation.

Dr Farshid Amirabdollahian, an expert in rehabilitation robotics and assistive technologies from Hertfordshire University’s School of Computer Science, told The Engineer: ‘This project is following on from research over the past 15 years, which has been looking at the potential of robots to deliver a series of repetitive tasks, as required in stroke-rehabilitation therapy.

‘The hand and the wrist are the least researched area of rehabilitation. There are two or three organisations that have looked at these body parts but no one has looked at implementing therapeutic robotic devices into people’s homes,’ he said. 

The team believes that by using a robotic device and an interactive game-based interface, the therapy could become more enjoyable than methods that include asking a patient to press a sponge ball with their fingers.