Integration of Rehabilitation Robotics in the Context of Smart Homes - Application to Assistive Robotics

Integration of Rehabilitation Robotics in the Context of Smart Homes

&nbsp;&nbsp;This paper describes our methodology to bridge rehabilitation robotics and smart homes (domotics), which are the two research areas aiming at the assistive technologies for disabled people.<BR>&nbsp;&nbsp;Rehabilitation robotics could be classified in two main research areas. The first area consists mainly on developing systems aiming to compensate for motor disabilities of the proper arm, usually due to spinal cord injuries or muscular dystrophies. This is defined as assistive robotics, where several systems appeared over the last two decades. It aims to help the disabled to be able to perform daily living tasks without assistance. The second area of research is the therapy robotics, or rehabilitation robotics, which aims at restoring motor deficiencies by using an arm robot with a defined protocol. Therapy robotics is mainly dedicated to people having a stroke.<BR>&nbsp;&nbsp;Smart homes, known as domotics in the Europe, aims at the user environment, to make it more accessible by adding automated controlled systems used via a common user interface, which is defined as an environmental control system. The smart homes context is not only limited to home environments, but is also applicable to hospitals, schools, outdoors, etc.<BR>&nbsp;&nbsp;In term of tasks we could say that smart homes are dedicated to control systems in the environment such as doors, windows, lights, TV, VCR, etc. Where, assistive robotics is mainly dedicated to manipulate objects, such as gripping object from the floor, drinking, eating, etc.<BR>&nbsp;&nbsp;This paper describes the adaptation of the software architecture developed for the Manus robot in the context of smart homes where the robot is considered as an object among the others.