Control strategies for effective robot assisted gait rehabilitation: The state of art and future prospects

• We review control strategies of gait rehabilitation robots.
• Assist-as-needed controls are popular in research, thus discussed in details.
• Related clinical trials are reviewed from the control viewpoint.
• Studies are yet to prove any specific control strategy is superior to the others.
• Biofeedback and kinetic assessments will facilitate further control development.

A large number of gait rehabilitation robots, together with a variety of control strategies, have been developed and evaluated during the last decade. Initially, control strategies applied to rehabilitation robots were adapted from those applied to traditional industrial robots. However, these strategies cannot optimise effectiveness of gait rehabilitation. As a result, researchers have been investigating control strategies tailored for the needs of rehabilitation. Among these control strategies, assisted-as-needed (AAN) control is one of the most popular research topics in this field. AAN training strategies have gained the theoretical and practical evidence based backup from motor learning principles and clinical studies. Various approaches to AAN training have been proposed and investigated by research groups all around the world. This article presents a review on control algorithms of gait rehabilitation robots to summarise related knowledge and investigate potential trends of development.There are existing review papers on control strategies of rehabilitation robots. The review by Marchal-Crespo and Reinkensmeyer (2009) had a broad cover of control strategies of all kinds of rehabilitation robots. Hussain et al. (2011) had specifically focused on treadmill gait training robots and covered a limited number of control implementations on them. This review article encompasses more detailed information on control strategies for robot assisted gait rehabilitation, but is not limited to treadmill based training. It also investigates the potential to further develop assist-as-needed gait training based on assessments of patients’ ability.In this paper, control strategies are generally divided into the trajectory tracking control and AAN control. The review covers these two basic categories, as well as other control algorithm and technologies derived from them, such as biofeedback control. Assessments on human gait ability are also included to investigate how to further develop implementations based on assist-as-needed concept. For the consideration of effectiveness, clinical studies on robotic gait rehabilitation are reviewed and analysed from the viewpoint of control algorithm.