MEAM Seminar: “Leveraging Robot-Based Haptic Dyads to Improve Community-Based Stroke Rehabilitation”

Disabilities related to aging and stroke impact functional independence and quality of life for millions of older adults, creating a growing need for scalable, accessible rehabilitation solutions. Community-based robotic therapy that leverages social interaction and haptic feedback offers a promising approach, particularly for individuals with motor and cognitive impairments.

This seminar presents work exploring how haptic interaction between individuals influences motor learning and usability in a rehabilitation context. I will begin with findings from a literature review on robot-based haptic dyads, highlighting how haptic connections have previously been used to study motor learning in healthy young adults. I will then present our design for a low-cost robotic rehabilitation system to haptically connect multiple users. Next, I will discuss preliminary results from a pilot study and full experimental protocol involving healthy older adults and stroke survivors, comparing individual and partnered motor learning in a robot-based tracking task. Analyses include performance outcomes, motor learning curves, and user-reported experience across conditions. I will also introduce a computational model of solo human-robot interaction, based on inverse optimal control, to simulate impaired sensorimotor behavior in a simplified robot-based assessment task.

Together, these studies provide a foundation for understanding how impairment shapes sensorimotor learning and how robot-based haptic dyads can be designed to support recovery. Future work will build on this foundation to model dyadic interaction strategies and implement adaptive controllers that balance partner abilities in collaborative rehabilitation tasks, with the ultimate goal of enabling personalized, socially engaging robot-based therapy.