Automated Assistive Therapy Device for Patients with Neurological Diseases

In this paper we describe the development of an automated therapy device for the use in neurological rehabilitation. The movement patterns of the therapy device belong to a manual therapy method which is based on hippotherapy. This manual therapy method can be used for patients with high movement restrictions because the patient can exercise in a lying position. Those parts of the development of the automated therapy device which we describe in this paper include the movement analysis of the manual therapy method, the mechanic dimensioning, the modeling and the path planning. Furthermore, we illustrate the implementation of our approach into a demonstrator and partially present our validation. The paper serves to demonstrate the clear advantages of developing and using automated assistive therapy devices in neurological rehabilitation.