Specially designed machines, which the authors call rehabilitators, could automate some of the repetitive aspects of physical and occupational therapy. The authors envision developing a family of inexpensive machines, each designed to retrain coordination in a specific activity of daily living, that could be used by physical and occupational therapists. To this end, the authors have built a rehabilitator for adaptively assisting hemiplegic stroke patients in bimanual lifting. The rehabilitator, operating under a simple control law, can adapt properly to two extremes of patient ability: no ability to apply force to an object with the disabled hand, and full ability to lift an object bimanually.
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