Humanoid Robot Provides Therapies to a Stroke Patient

Sharon Moore March 22, 2013

In a case study which involved a 72-year old stroke patient, researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst found that robot-delivered speech and physical therapies may significantly help improve patients’ condition, and raise their quality of life.

The study was carried out primarily to assess how therapy interventions in one domain affect another. In this case, the researchers employed two different therapeutic targets – speech and movement. The client who had aphasia and physical disability went through speech therapy for five weeks, and physical therapy for another five weeks. After the individual therapies, he then received both speech and physical therapies for five more weeks. Sessions include word-retrieval games and arm movement tasks that are administered by a humanoid robot.

The patient made notable improvements in his upper-limb movements as well as in his verbal expression. However, such improvements were at a greater degree when the patient had one therapy at a time. The researchers conclude that speech and physical functions appeared to compete for limited resources in the brain so the results are not that good.

Humanoid Robots as Therapists?

A stroke is a serious medical condition that occurs when the supply of blood in the brain is cut off. The effects of stroke can either be temporary or permanent. Often, patients develop problems with their speech and motion. In worse cases, stroke could lead to sudden death. In the UK, stroke is a major health concern. In England alone, almost 150,000 people die because of it, a fact that makes stroke the third leading cause of death in the country, next to cancer and heart disease. People ages 65 and above are more at risk of having a stroke but it could happen even to younger individuals.

Patients of stroke are usually given therapies to improve their health and restore the physical abilities that were impaired. With the arrival of more powerful humanoid robots, the medical community is taking steps to study the possibility of these robots acting as ‘therapists’. The lead authors of the current study, Yu-kyong Choe, a language pathologist, and Rod Grupen, a robot expert hope to aid human-to-human interaction, so a robot can temporarily take the therapist’s place. They argued that having a personal robot could save billions of pounds in elder care while letting patients stay in their homes or communities. Nevertheless, creating humanoid therapists could be much more expensive than training real people to provide therapeutic services to stroke patients.

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Robot-Delivered Speech and Physical Therapy a Success