Kilian Baur

ETH Zurich | ETH Zürich · Department of Health Sciences and Technology

Assistive robotic technology will only fulfill its potential if devices are accepted and regularly used by people with physical disabilities in their everyday life. The Cybathlon is a unique championship in which people with physical disabilities compete against each other to complete everyday tasks using latest robotic technology. The competition...

Background: We present a robot-assisted telerehabilitation system that allows for haptic interaction between therapist and patient over distance. It consists of two arm therapy robots. Attached to one robot the therapists can feel on their own arm the limitations of the patient's arm which is attached to the other robot. Due to the exoskeleton str...

Background: Robots have been successfully applied in motor training during neurorehabilitation. As music is known to improve motor function and motivation in neurorehabilitation training, we aimed at integrating music creation into robotic-assisted motor therapy. We developed a virtual game-like environment with music for the arm therapy robot ARM...

Background Multiplayer games have emerged as a promising approach to increase the motivation of patients involved in rehabilitation therapy. In this systematic review, we evaluated recent publications in health-related multiplayer games that involved patients with cognitive and/or motor impairments. The aim was to investigate the effect of multipla...

Goal-directed reaching movements in three-dimensions are important for our interaction with the environment. Instrumented setups displaying virtual targets for rehabilitation training of reaching movements often provide limited depth cues, which may affect movements. This work aims to quantify effects of limited depth cues on reaching movements. We...

Background Goal-directed reaching for real-world objects by humans is enabled through visual depth cues. In virtual environments, the number and quality of available visual depth cues is limited, which may affect reaching performance and quality of reaching movements. Methods We assessed three-dimensional reaching movements in five experimental gr...

Subject average hand path ratio group comparison. The boxes in group color denote median and the 50 coverage intervals. The whiskers indicated ±2.7 standard deviations or 99.3% coverage intervals. Small plus symbols denote the outliers. Horizontal black bars above the boxes denote significant group differences in the Tukey-Kramer post-hoc test; A s...

More detailed information on depth cue implementation and rationale. The supplementary S1 Table was added to give some more detailed information and rationale on the different depth cues from Table 1. (PDF)

Investigator’s study protocol. The supplementary S1 Protocol is the checklist according to which the investigator instructed the subject. Dependent on the subject’s preference, the instruction was given in English or German. (PDF)

Result data container. The supplementary S1 Dataset container (.zip file) contains two Matlab® tables (saved as .mat files). “averageResultsTableFile.mat” contains the outcome data of subject means required for the between group analyses (Fig 3, Fig 4, Table 2, and S1 Fig). “resultsTableFile.mat” contains the outcome data for each individual moveme...

Rehabilitation training is a key component in the treatment of patients with neurological disorders such as stroke and spinal cord injury. A key parameter in rehabilitation is to have a high level of intensity during training—that is, training where a patient performs a high number of repetitions under high levels of mental and physical effort. To...

Multiplayer environments are thought to increase the training intensity in robot-aided rehabilitation therapy after stroke. We developed a haptic-based environment to investigate the dynamics of two-player training performing time-constrained reaching movements using the ARMin rehabilitation robot. We implemented a challenge level adaptation algori...

A complex combination of spasticity, muscle synergies and reduced range and quality of motion is often observed in stroke patients. New technologies such as robots or tele-rehabilitation offer promising concepts to improve recovery. Robots can provide repetitive high-intensive training, objective therapy and assessment, but they do not allow the th...

Therapists have been conducting training sessions with patients in rehabilitation for decades, but robot developers have not set focus on usability and acceptance of rehabilitation devices by the therapy staff [1], [2]. One important factor for robot usability is robot transparency, i.e. the robot does neither disturb the patient nor the therapist...

Age-related decline in grey and white brain matter goes together with cognitive depletion. To influence cognitive functioning in elderly, several types of physical exercise and nutritional intervention have been performed. This paper systematically reviews the potential additive and complementary effects of nutrition/nutritional supplements and phy...

Robot-assisted arm therapy is increasingly applied in neurorehabilitation. The reason for this development over the last decades was that robots relieve the therapist from hard physical work while the training intensity can be increased. Importantly, an increase in training intensity is closely linked to functional improvements of the patient. Howe...

Muscle weakness is one of the major deficits after stroke but specific strength training is seldom included in robot-assisted rehabilitation. At the same time, the emergence of robotic devices for stroke therapy offers technical possibilities for strength training. We propose a control strategy for strength training that is based on a viscous force...

Haptic guidance in robot-assisted therapy does not only relieve the therapist from physical work load and increase the possible training intensity. Haptic guidance can also be used to adapt the task difficulty level to the patient's abilities, which is assumed to maximize the learning rate. Hereby, task difficulty can address either the patient's p...

Keeping the attention level and observing multiple physiological and biomechanical variables at the same time at high precision is very challenging for human trainers. Concurrent augmented feedback, which is suggested to enhance motor learning in complex motor tasks, can also hardly be provided by a human trainer. Thus, in this paper, a concept for...