Learning Therapist Policy from Therapist-Exoskeleton-Patient Interaction

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Snyder, Grayson, Vianello, Lorenzo, Hargrove, Levi, Elwin, Matthew L., Pons, Jose
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2026
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author Snyder, Grayson
Vianello, Lorenzo
Hargrove, Levi
Elwin, Matthew L.
Pons, Jose
author_facet Snyder, Grayson
Vianello, Lorenzo
Hargrove, Levi
Elwin, Matthew L.
Pons, Jose
contents Post-stroke rehabilitation is often necessary for patients to regain proper walking gait. However, the typical therapy process can be exhausting and physically demanding for therapists, potentially reducing therapy intensity, duration, and consistency over time. We propose a Patient-Therapist Force Field (PTFF) to visualize therapist responses to patient kinematics and a Synthetic Therapist (ST) machine learning model to support the therapist in dyadic robot-mediated physical interaction therapy. The first encodes patient and therapist stride kinematics into a shared low-dimensional latent manifold using a Variational Autoencoder (VAE) and models their interaction through a Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM), which learns a probabilistic vector field mapping patient latent states to therapist responses. This representation visualizes patient-therapist interaction dynamics to inform therapy strategies and robot controller design. The latter is implemented as a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network trained on patient-therapist interaction data to predict therapist-applied joint torques from patient kinematics. Trained and validated using leave-one-out cross-validation across eight post-stroke patients, the model was integrated into a ROS-based exoskeleton controller to generate real-time torque assistance based on predicted therapist responses. Offline results and preliminary testing indicate the potential of their use as an alternative approach to post-stroke exoskeleton therapy. The PTFF provides understanding of the therapist's actions while the ST frees the human therapist from the exoskeleton, allowing them to continuously monitor the patient's nuanced condition.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_02458
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Learning Therapist Policy from Therapist-Exoskeleton-Patient Interaction
Snyder, Grayson
Vianello, Lorenzo
Hargrove, Levi
Elwin, Matthew L.
Pons, Jose
Robotics
Post-stroke rehabilitation is often necessary for patients to regain proper walking gait. However, the typical therapy process can be exhausting and physically demanding for therapists, potentially reducing therapy intensity, duration, and consistency over time. We propose a Patient-Therapist Force Field (PTFF) to visualize therapist responses to patient kinematics and a Synthetic Therapist (ST) machine learning model to support the therapist in dyadic robot-mediated physical interaction therapy. The first encodes patient and therapist stride kinematics into a shared low-dimensional latent manifold using a Variational Autoencoder (VAE) and models their interaction through a Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM), which learns a probabilistic vector field mapping patient latent states to therapist responses. This representation visualizes patient-therapist interaction dynamics to inform therapy strategies and robot controller design. The latter is implemented as a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network trained on patient-therapist interaction data to predict therapist-applied joint torques from patient kinematics. Trained and validated using leave-one-out cross-validation across eight post-stroke patients, the model was integrated into a ROS-based exoskeleton controller to generate real-time torque assistance based on predicted therapist responses. Offline results and preliminary testing indicate the potential of their use as an alternative approach to post-stroke exoskeleton therapy. The PTFF provides understanding of the therapist's actions while the ST frees the human therapist from the exoskeleton, allowing them to continuously monitor the patient's nuanced condition.
title Learning Therapist Policy from Therapist-Exoskeleton-Patient Interaction
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02458