Ways to Learn a Therapist’s Patient-specific Intervention: Robotics-vs Telerobotics-mediated Hands-on Teaching

Due to the limitations of therapists time and healthcare resources to cover the increasing demand for rehabilitation services, robot-assisted rehabilitation is becoming an appealing, powerful and economical solution. In our previous research, a solution that combines Learning from Demonstration (LfD) and robotic rehabilitation to save the therapists time and reduce the therapy costs was proposed. In this paper we compare two modalities, Robot-and Telerobotic-Mediated Kinesthetic Teaching (RMKT and TMKT), for implementing LfD in robotic rehabilitation. Our results show that behaviors demonstrated in both modalities are able to be imitated accurately, but demonstrations in TMKT have less repeatability.