Recent control concepts in human motor rehabilitation: a review to its optimization

D. Despotova, P. Kiriazov

Abstract: Motion performance optimisation is needed in various daily life and sport activities, especially for people with movement disorders due to stroke, trauma, or neurological diseases. The main performance indices are motion/posture accuracy, movement execution time, and energy expenditure. The human musculo-skeletal system is an extremely complex dynamic system and the challenging question is how it is controlled by the central nervous system (CNS) and the human performance - optimized with respect to these complicated requirements. Besides to able-bodied individuals, we pay special attention to disabled people, and we consider how to improve their motor control and efficiently restore their motion functionality. Generally speaking, in the past thirty years, there has been an increasing recognition that technologies, including robotics, orthotics, wearable sensors, computer vision, computer gaming, electrical stimulation, virtual reality, machine learning, and computational modelling, can play an important role in the human motor rehabilitation. Besides the various traditional techniques, the paper will present more contemporary approaches and methods in human motor rehabilitation as: robotic aids in performing training exercises; functional electrical stimulation; brain-computer interfaces; iterative learning control; and optimization methods for human motor control.

Series on Biomechanics, Vol.31, No.3 (2017), 3-15

Keywords: controllability; functional rehabilitation; Motor control; optimization

Date published: 2017-12-12