Research Activities Using a Rehabilitation Robot for Patients with Hemiplegia After Stroke (Introduced under the FY2025 Research Equipment and Facilities Procurement Scheme)

Under the FY2025 Research Equipment and Facilities Procurement Scheme, a rehabilitation robot for patients with post-stroke hemiplegia has been provided to the Service Robotics Laboratory (Prof. Daisuke Chugo) in the Faculty of Engineering.The Service Robotics Laboratory has been developing rehabilitation assistance robots designed to encourage voluntary movement in patients, such as those with post-stroke hemiplegia, tailored to their individual muscle deficits.
As a result of this research, the laboratory has proposed a rehabilitation support robot based on a novel concept: by correlating external phenomena (output), such as changes in the patient’s posture, with the internal muscle coordination phenomena (input) that cause them, the robot determines what kind of external support force or load should be applied to elicit the desired muscle coordination because of impaired muscle function.
The rehabilitation robot introduced on this occasion is far more refined than the prototypes developed in the laboratory, featuring a sleek housing, safety measures such as collision prevention functions, and an interface designed for ease of use by occupational therapists, so that it can be trialled by physiotherapists in clinical settings and by actual patients.
The Service Robotics Laboratory intends to utilise this robot to obtain feedback on new rehabilitation outcomes, using muscle coordination in patients with hemiplegia following a stroke as an evaluation metric, and to further advance this research.