Development of a patient behavior model for an adaptive medical robot

The thesis focuses on the development and evaluation of a patient behavior model, which is to be used to quantify the patient’s contribution to the generation of the movements performed during robot-assisted lower limb mobilization. This study allows adaptation of the robot’s behaviour based on the patient’s capabilities in order to guarantee a therapy progression. The work will provide a strategy based both on I st principle and data-driven approaches. Our best performing model includes a cooperation between those strategies, which is able to predict the required torques for the mobilization of a completely passive subject during different therapy’s configurations. The model only uses data available from the robot’s system without exploiting additional sensors. Validation is conducted with real human data for a total of 10 healthy subjects.