People with movement disorders are plagued with debilitating conditions, which significantly degrade their quality of life. Traditional rehabilitation typically involves intensive interaction between patients and therapists. While effective, traditional rehabilitation cannot keep abreast of the increasing patient population primarily attributed to a higher surviving rate after diseases and/or injuries. Furthermore, patients living in the rural areas have fairly limited access to rehabilitation services. In the past two decades, tremendous efforts have been put into developing rehabilitation and assistive robots to facilitate the rehabilitation training while relieving the physical involvement of therapists and/or lowering the related cost. Most notably, the rehabilitation and assistive robots have been significantly advanced with developments in actuators, sensors, microprocessors, and mobile software platforms. However, unlike traditional robotics, the intimate interaction between robot and human in rehabilitation robots indicates that the success is also closely related to a thorough understanding of the human neuromuscular aspects and human-machine interaction.
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