Human-like Robotic Controllers for Enhanced Motor Learning — HRCEML  

Stroke Clinical Trial

Official title: Human-like Robotic Controllers for Enhanced Motor Learning

Status Recruiting

Clinical Trial Summary

The purpose of this study is to develop a new paradigm to understand how humans physically interact with each other at a single and at multiple joints, with multiple contact points, so as to synthesize robot controllers that can exhibit human-like behavior when interacting with humans (e.g., exoskeleton) or other co-robots. The investigators will develop models for a single joint robot (i.e. at the ankle joint) that can vary its haptic behavioral interactions at variable impedances, and replicate in a multi-joint robot (i.e. at the ankle, knee, and hip joints). The investigators will collect data from healthy participants and clinical populations to create a controller based on our models to implement in the robots. Then, the investigators will test our models via the robots to investigate the mechanisms underlying enhanced motor learning during different human-human haptic interaction behaviors (i.e. collaboration, competition, and cooperation. This study will be carried out in healthy participants, participants post-stroke, and participants with spinal cord injury (SCI).

Clinical Trial Description

The investigators will look at how the task performance and motor performance of individuals in dyadic physical interactions are affected by 1) different behavioral interaction conditions (i.e., solo task, collaboration task, competition task, or cooperation task); 2) the haptic impedance or stiffness of the virtual connection between dyadic peers (i.e., hard connection, medium connection, or soft connection); and 3) the skill level of the other partner (i.e., novice or expert). The investigators will be using both an ankle robot (M1 device) and a bilateral lower limb exoskeleton (H3/X2 device), and will collect EMG and EEG data.

For Experiment A , the investigators will recruit healthy volunteers (n = 180) to work in dyadic pairs. With the collected data, the investigators will model how humans adapt force and impedance and share roles/specialize during various dyadic interaction behaviors, and use this knowledge to develop robot controllers that mimic movement error and force adaptation for enhanced motor performance.

For Experiment B , the investigators will recruit healthy volunteers (n = 180), participants post-stroke (n = 72) and participants post-SCI (n = 72) to work in dyadic pairs within each population. The investigators will test the robot controllers following the models for mechanical adaptation and role sharing strategies between peers based on Experiment A. The investigators will also monitor single-joint and multi-joint movement error and force adaptation in regards to enhanced motor performance. The investigators will assess if the robot controllers can pass a "haptic Turing Test", rendering them indistinguishable with respect to human peers. A structural MRI will be obtained to be used for EEG source analysis.

For Experiment C, the investigators will showcase the robot controllers by interfacing with participants post-stroke (n = 20) and participants post-SCI (n = 20) with the single-joint and multi-joint assistive robots to observe motor learning and functional outcomes with 10 training sessions per robot. ;

Related Conditions & MeSH terms

• Spinal Cord Injuries
• Stroke

• NCT number: NCT04578665
• Study type: Interventional
• Source: Shirley Ryan AbilityLab
• Contact: Jose Pons, Ph.D
• Phone: 312-238-4549
• Email: jpons@sralab.org
• Status: Recruiting
• Phase: N/A
• Start date: July 13, 2021
• Completion date: December 2025