Centro tecnológico Cartif

Robotics and Control applied to healthcare

Robots are used in industrial environments to achieve higher productivity and improve the quality levels of the manufactured products.

Service robotics is a discipline whose objective is to use robots in non-industrial environments. One of the most developed fields in the last few decades is the use of robots in the healthcare environment: orthopedic surgery operations, laparoscopic surgery operations, rehabilitation tasks, assistance for disabled people, etc. In all of these uses, the main objective is to give the doctor a robotic device that helps to guide and control robotic tools, which will be used in their application areas, to improve the physician‘s abilities.

The line of robotics and control applied to healthcare has as goal the development and application of the control techniques, which are usually used with success within industrial environments, on robotic devices used in the medical fields of orthopedic surgery and rehabilitation.

Within this research line, two application areas are developed:

1.- Development of a robotic system for computer-assisted orthopedic surgery, aimed at easing bone drilling, for distal blockage surgery, and for the interventions for long-bones fracture repair through the use of intramedullary nails.

2.- Development of a system for rehabilitation of patients with upper limbs (wrist, arm, shoulder) disability by using a robotic device, which can change the intensity of assistive therapies, dynamically regulating the amount of assistance/resistance given to the patient by the robotic system, according to the values of the physiological signals of the patient (“biofeedback”) that are being measured and processed “on-line” while the patient is undergoing the robot-assisted rehabilitation therapy.

Projects

Fluoronail

AACRI