Cerebral Palsy (CP) is a disorder of posture and movement due to an imperfection or lesion in the immature brain. CP is often associated to sensory deficits, cognition impairments, communication and motor disabilities, behaviour issues, seizure disorder, pain and secondary musculoskeletal problems. New strategies are needed to help to promote, maintain, and rehabilitate the functional capacity, and thereby diminish the dedication and assistance required and the economical demands that this condition represents for the patient, the caregivers and the whole society. This paper describes the conceptualization and development of the integrated CPWalker robotic platform to support novel therapies for CP rehabilitation. This platform (Smart Walker + exoskeleton) is controlled by a multimodal interface to establish the interaction of CP children with robot-based therapies. The objective of these therapies is to improve the physical skills of children with CP and similar disorders. CPWalker concept will promote the earlier incorporation of CP patients to the rehabilitation therapy and increase the level of intensity and frequency of the exercises according to the task, which will enable the maintenance of therapeutic methods in daily basis, with the intention to lead to significant improvements in the treatment outcome.

Tremor constitutes the most common motor disorder, and poses a functional problem to a large number of patients. Despite of the considerable experience in tremor management, current treatment based on drugs or surgery does not attain an effective attenuation in 25 % of patients, motivating the need for research in new therapeutic alternatives. In this context, this paper presents the concept design, development, and preliminary validation of a soft wearable robot for tremor assessment and suppression. The TREMOR neurorobot comprises a Brain Neural Computer Interface that monitors the whole neuromusculoskeletal system, aiming at characterizing both voluntary movement and tremor, and a Functional Electrical Stimulation system that compensates for tremulous movements without impeding the user perform functional tasks. First results demonstrate the performance of the TREMOR neurorobot as a novel means of assessing and attenuating pathological tremors.

Biomechanical loading, in particular, viscous loading of the upper limb has been proposed in the literature as a means for suppressing pathologic tremor. It is expected that an improvement on manipulative function can be obtained by reducing the tremorous motion associated to some neurological disorders. This article presents two non-grounded control strategies to suppress tremor by means of a orthotic (wearable) exoskeleton. These two strategies are based on biomechanical loading and notch filtering of tremor via internal forces. Both controls strategies are evaluated and validated on the robotic exoskeleton called WOTAS (wearable orthosis for tremor assessment and suppression). At the end, results obtained in the pre-clinical trials and conclusions of this study are presented

There is a need for wearable powered upper limb exoskeletons able to apply forces to the upper limb for use by people with disabilities and/or limb weakness or injury. The robotic exoskeleton called WOTAS (Wearable Orthosis for Tremor Assessment and Suppression) presented in this paper will provide a means of testing non-grounded control strategies in order to help these people. For instance, biomechanical loading, in particular, viscous loading of the upper limb has been proposed in the literature as a means for suppressing pathologic tremor. This article describes in detail the general concept for WOTAS, outlining the special features of the design and selection of system components.