Robot Assisted Ankle Neuro-Rehabilitation: State of the art and Future Challenges

Introduction: Robot-assisted neuro-rehabilitation is gaining acceptability among the physical therapy community. The ankle is one of the most complicated anatomical joints in the human body and neurologic injuries such as stroke often result in ankle and foot disabilities. Areas covered: Robotic solutions for the ankle joint physical therapy have extensively been researched. Significant research has been conducted on the mechanism design, actuation as well as control of these ankle rehabilitation robots. Also, the experimental evaluations of these robots have been conducted with healthy and neurologically impaired subjects. This paper presents a comprehensive review of the recent developments in the field of robot-assisted ankle rehabilitation. Mechanism design, actuation, and various types of control strategies are discussed. Also, the experimental evaluations of these ankle rehabilitation robots are discussed in the context of the evaluation of robotic hardware with healthy subjects as well as motor function outcomes with neurologically impaired subjects. Expert opinion: Significant progress in the mechanism design, control, and experimental evaluations of the ankle rehabilitation robots have been reported. However, more sensing and reference trajectory generation methods need to be developed as well as more objective quantitive evaluations that need to be conducted for establishing the clinical significance of these robots.