As the aging population increases, so does the demand for personalized care and rehabilitation for individuals with neurological disorders. Effective recovery programs require intensive, task-oriented training, yet delivering continuous and individualized care remains a major challenge. Technological innovations such as wearable sensors and socially interactive robots can enhance patient monitoring and improve medical teams’ situational awareness. This paper presents a preliminary evaluation of a robot-based architecture deployed in a real clinical setting, designed to support rehabilitation tasks and patient monitoring. The results demonstrate the system’s feasibility in providing therapists with timely and accurate data, facilitating natural interactions with patients, and minimizing the need for technical interventions during use.

This paper presents the kinematic characterization of a 3-Cylindrical-Prismatic-Universal (3-CPU) parallel manipulator designed for motions of pure rotation. The machine has been conceived at the Polytechnic University of Marche, and recent studies have shown that its kinematic architecture can be exploited for the realization of reconfigurable machines with different kinds of motions (pure rotational, pure translational, and planar motions among others). The 3-CPU concept has been subject to further investigations for a deeper understanding of this peculiar behavior. After a brief introduction to these concepts, the paper faces the position and the differential kinematics of the 3-CPU spherical manipulator aiming at identifying workspace boundaries and its kinematic manipulability.

The paper describes the architecture of a novel parallel kinematics machine that is characterized by motions of pure translation. It is shown that the Cartesian arrangement of the 3 limbs assures simple kinematic relations and an isotropic workspace, without any rotation or translation singularity. Such good features should allow the design of parallel robots that are characterized by simple controllers and good performances, as an alternative to current mechanical schemes.