Understanding and Enhancing Proprioception via Model-Based Human-Robot Interactions

本体感觉是对身体位置和运动的感觉，它来自身体关节和肌肉中的专门传感器。大约一半的中风幸存者身体一侧的本体感觉受损。本项目的研究目标是为中风等神经损伤后本体感觉障碍患者开发针对上肢康复的个性化机器人干预。该项目将进行人体实验，开发新的计算模型，并使用机器学习方法来增强个性化、自适应机器人干预的设计，针对每个个体的特定损伤情况进行优化。该项目将通过开发新的机器人疗法来促进科学进步和促进国民健康，这些疗法有可能改善大量中风后感觉运动障碍患者的生活质量。此外，这项工作可能会通过优化神经康复技术和机器人交付来减少中风的医疗成本负担，从而增加国家的繁荣。该项目的更广泛的影响包括通过与国家生物力学日和即将开发的研讨会相关的活动，努力使不同群体的高中生接触到生物力学。该项目将研究人类如何结合视觉和本体感受信息来估计上肢位置，然后使用这些数据来指导中风幸存者的机器人辅助康复的开发和测试。该项目将开展三组活动：1)人类受试者实验，利用人机交互来表征肢体姿势和运动评估过程中与中风相关的多感觉整合缺陷；2)发展贝叶斯多感觉整合模型的新扩展，评估其描述脑卒中后多感觉线索组合受损的能力；3)设计和实现个性化、机器人辅助、受试者自适应的训练算法，以恢复中风后上肢的多感觉功能。该项目推进了M3X项目的愿景，因为它不仅利用人机交互来询问中风后个体的感觉运动状态，而且还使用个性化的机器人训练方法来推动感觉运动功能的改善。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Proprioception is the sense of body position and movement that comes from specialized sensors in the joints and muscles of the body. Proprioception is impaired on one side of the body in about half of stroke survivors. The research objective of this project is to develop personalized robotic interventions targeting upper extremity rehabilitation for people with proprioceptive impairments after neurological injury such as stroke. The project will conduct human subject experiments, develop novel computational models, and use machine learning methods to enhance the design of personalized, subject-adaptive robotic interventions that are optimized for each individual's specific profile of impairment. This project will promote the progress of science and advance national health by developing new robotic therapies that have the potential to improve quality of life for a large number of people with sensorimotor impairments after stroke. Additionally, the work may increase national prosperity by reducing the healthcare cost burden of stroke through optimization of neurorehabilitative techniques and their robotic delivery. Broader impacts of the project include efforts to expose a diverse group of high school students to biomechanics through activities associated with National Biomechanics Day and a workshop to be developed.This project will examine how humans combine visual and proprioceptive information to estimate upper limb position, and then use these data to guide the development and testing of robot-aided rehabilitation in stroke survivors. The project will conduct three sets of activities: 1) human subject experiments exploiting human-robotic interactions to characterize stroke-related deficits of multisensory integration during the assessment of limb posture and movement; 2) the development of novel extensions to Bayesian models of multi-sensory integration and evaluation of their ability to describe impaired multisensory cue combination post-stroke; and 3) the design and implementation of individualized, robot-assisted, subject-adaptive training algorithms to rehabilitate multisensory function in upper limb impairment after stroke. This project advances the M3X program vision because it exploits human-robot interactions not only to interrogate the sensorimotor state of individuals after stroke, but to also drive improvement in sensorimotor function using an individualized robotic training approach.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.