Characteristics and Emerging Trends in Research on Rehabilitation Robots from 2001 to 2020: Bibliometric Study

Background: The past 2 decades have seen rapid development in the use of robots for rehabilitation. Research on rehabilitation robots involves interdisciplinary activities, making it a great challenge to obtain comprehensive insights in this research field.Objective: We performed a bibliometric study to understand the characteristics of research on rehabilitation robots and emerging trends in this field in the last 2 decades.Methods: Reports on the topic of rehabilitation robots published from January 1, 2001, to December 31, 2020, were retrieved from the Web of Science Core Collection on July 28, 2022. Document types were limited to "article" and "meeting" (excluding the "review" type), to ensure that our analysis of the evolution over time of this research had high validity. We used CiteSpace to conduct a co-occurrence and co-citation analysis and to visualize the characteristics of this research field and emerging trends. Landmark publications were identified using metrics such as betweenness centrality and burst strength. Results: Through data retrieval, cleaning, and deduplication, we retrieved 9287 publications and 110,619 references cited in these publications that were on the topic of rehabilitation robots and were published between 2001 and 2020. Results of the Mann-Kendall test indicated that the numbers of both publications (P<.001; St=175.0) and citations (P<.001; St=188.0) related to rehabilitation robots exhibited a significantly increasing yearly trend. The co-occurrence results revealed 120 categories connected with research on rehabilitation robots; we used these categories to determine research relationships. The co-citation results identified 169 co-citation clusters characterizing this research field and emerging trends in it. The most prominent label was "soft robotic technology" (the burst strength was 79.07), which has become a topic of great interest in rehabilitative recovery for both the upper and lower limbs. Additionally, task-oriented upper-limb training, control strategies for robot-assisted lower limb rehabilitation, and power in exoskeleton robots were topics of great interest in current research.Conclusions: Our work provides insights into research on rehabilitation robots, including its characteristics and emerging trends during the last 2 decades, providing a comprehensive understanding of this research field.