I want to
build rehabilitation machines – machines that would help patients recover faster and regain the strength after trauma
or surgery. At present, rehabilitation machines are either not fully automatic and if they, then their huge size and high
cost accounts for their immobility and commercial usability. A better rehabilitation system would be autonomous system which
can interact with the patients, understand their emotions, pain and behave accordingly.
The chief complication in this process is to understand the emotions and behavior of patients. Since
different patients have different resistance level, the robots need to understand them. This involves some kind of information
in the form of patient’s pain to be feedback to the robot and learning the robot to behave accordingly along with motivating
the patient to try his/her best.
But still my research has not reached to this phase. Presently, I am involved in the development of
open loop rehabilitation systems where the robots don’t get any feed back from the patients to behave. They are either
used to assist the patient to do exercise which is so called as “Passive Motion” or are used for testing the improvement
in patients by providing some visual feedback during training or test modes.
Research Interest:
My research interest involves design of intelligent bio robots which involve more of mechatronic
stuff so that the mechanical systems can be made to work autonomously with smart controllers.
