A substantial amount of research has proven that social assistive robots have a broad application prospect in various rehabilitation treatments. In this regard, Bahar Irfan and colleagues developed a personalized rehabilitation monitoring robot based on NAO and conducted clinical experiments, using it in a hospital in Bogota to encourage heart disease patients to engage in rehabilitation training. The research findings were published in the July 2022 issue of Nature magazine.
Since heart disease patients often lack motivation and struggle to persist in exercise rehabilitation training, researchers employed the social robot NAO for personalized training monitoring. After being programmed, NAO can recognize specific patients, retrieve their previous training records, and interact with them; during exercise, NAO monitors the patient's heart rate, posture, and other indicators through multiple sensors, promptly alerts or makes emergency calls in case of abnormalities, provides voice prompts for the patient to moderately increase or decrease the intensity of training, and offers encouragement.
The study found that compared to the traditional one-on-one rehabilitation training with therapists, the one-on-one rehabilitation training based on NAO significantly improved the health and motivation to persist of 17 patients over a two-and-a-half-year experimental period. Both doctors and patients gave positive feedback on NAO and recommended further use in future cardiac rehabilitation training.
"I am confident in using robots for rehabilitation training, because I know it is personalized, and it will continuously monitor my performance and progress."
"In the traditional treatment process, our resources are limited, however, the help of robots enhances the supervision of the treatment process."
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