Rehabilitation robotics and allied digital technologies: opportunities, barriers and solutions for improving their...

Robotics has been proposed as a promising solution for treating individuals with motor, sensory, and/or cognitive disabilities. Despite the great technological effort put into this field, the translation of robots from the laboratory to the clinical environment is not a seamless and smooth process, and their real-world adoption remains limited. Several barriers to the introduction of robotics in clinical practice have been identified, including a lack of sufficient scientific evidence about its actual cost/effectiveness, resistance to adopting these technologies, and economic, ethical, and regulatory restraints. Fit for Medical Robotics (Fit4MedRob) is an ambitious Initiative designed to bridge the gap between technological innovation and clinical application. One of the main goals of the Initiative is to conduct large-scale pragmatic trials to evaluate the effectiveness and the sustainability of commercially available robotic solutions. To guide the design of these trials, different online surveys have been implemented and delivered to identify the needs of healthcare practitioners and patients at different phases of the disease (acute to chronic) and therapeutic settings (hospital to home care). The results of the Initiative will suggest new organizational models to effectively introduce robotics-assisted rehabilitation into clinical practice. The paper will report on the opportunities of robotics for rehabilitation, the barriers to their clinical implementation, and the proposal of Fit4MedRob to overcome such limitations and facilitate the effective clinical implementation of robotic solutions.