Assessment of Upper Limb Movement with an Autonomous Robotic Device in a School Environment for Children with Cerebral Palsy

Robotic devices are becoming more prevalent in rehabilitation of neurological disorders. Studies focus on clinical measures alongside robotic intervention, but assessment data can be collected as the subjects are using the rehabilitation device. As part of an autonomous robotic rehabilitation device in primary schools, this paper introduces an assessment tool that can engage subjects and measure performance on a more granular scale across an 8 week intervention. The deployments are split in to two parts of single and dual use with a 4 week washout period in-between. Analysis of the scores achieved on the assessment task show improvement on the rehabilitation system, and the data can also be used as part of an adaptive algorithm for the robotic assistance. The data on this pilot study with 11 children with Cerebral Palsy shows that the assessment task can pick up trends of improvement across the deployments. Although the data is noisy, there is significant difference over the washout period, which shows that improvement is maintained after rehabilitation training. The order of single and dual use of the device did not influence the improvement. The simplicity of the assessment tasks makes implementation easy, and collects enough data over a short period of time for significant changes.