Bimanual Haptic-desktop platform for upper-limb post-stroke rehabilitation: Practical trials

This paper presents three haptic-based virtual applications for the undergoing rehabilitation of upper-limb post stroke patients. The three exercises are developed for their use on the multi-modal interface so-called Bimanual Haptic Desktop System (BHDS), which integrates the haptic functionalities and Video Display Terminal (VDT) within the work-plane of a desk. Firstly, two basic exercises, tracking task and lifting task, are carried out for the recovery of basic arm motion-coordination skills and steadiness of patients' upper-limb. Secondly, a video-game-like exercise, catching task, is developed to compare online the performance of healthy upper-limb with impaired ones wherein hand-eye coordination exercise of the patient is included. To this end, the proposed exercises provide to patients the potential methods to train their post-stroke upper-limbs malfunctions while reporting the quantitative parameters obtained to evaluate the improvement of patients recovery. Experimental results of a preliminary evaluation on healthy subjects are then reported and discussed to visualize in near future a pilot medical trials of the system on impaired people.