Predicting Intention of Motion During Rehabilitation Tasks of the Upper-Extremity

Rehabilitation promoting "assistance-as-needed" is considered a promising scheme of active rehabilitation, since it can promote neuroplasticity faster and thus reduce the time needed until restoration. To implement such schemes using robotic devices, it is crucial to be able to predict accurately and in real-time the intention of motion of the patient. In this study, we present an intention-of-motion model trained on healthy volunteers. The model is trained using kinematics and muscle activation time series data, and returns future predicted values for the kinematics. We also present the results of an analysis of the sensitivity of the accuracy of the model for different amount of training datasets and varying lengths of the prediction horizon. We demonstrate that the model is able to predict reliably the kinematics of volunteers that were not involved in its training. The model is tested with three types of motion inspired by rehabilibation tasks. In all cases, the model is predicting the arm kinematics with a Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) below 0.12m. Being a non person-specific model, it could be used to predict kinematics even for patients that are not able to perform any motion without assistance. The resulting kinematics, even if not fully representative of the specific patient, might be a preferable input for a robotic rehabilitator than predefined trajectories currently in use.