Toward Standardizing the Classification of Robotic Gait Rehabilitation Systems.

With the existence of numerous rehabilitation systems, their classification and comparison becomes difficult, especially when considering many factors. Moreover, most current reviews are descriptive and do not provide systematic methods for the visual comparison of systems. This review proposes a method for classifying systems, representing them graphically to easily visualize all characteristics of different systems at the same time. This method could be an introduction for standardizing the evaluation of gait rehabilitation systems. The method evaluates four main robotic modules, body weight support, reciprocal stepping mechanism, pelvis mechanism and environment module, of 27 different gait systems based on a set of characteristics. The combination of these modular evaluations provides a description of the system "in the space of rehabilitation". The evaluation of each robotic module, based on specific characteristics, showed diverse tendencies. While there is an augmented interest in developing more sophisticated reciprocal stepping mechanisms, few researches are dedicated to enhance the properties of pelvis mechanisms.