Robotic Nation Evidence

Robo Rehab

From the article:

Each year 700,000 people in the United States have a stroke. About three-quarters survive, but more than half suffer from impaired movement. Their route to recovery is long and tough, as they painfully relearn how to use an arm or a leg by going through the motions over and over again with a physical or occupational therapist.

Unfortunately, all that therapist time gets very expensive, and health insurers have dramatically cut the amount of therapy they will reimburse. "When I started, it was three to five months," says Susan Fasoli, an MIT researcher and occupational therapist. "Now we're lucky if we get patients for three weeks."

Given less therapy, many stroke victims never recover as well as they might. 'The more therapy you do and the more intense the therapy is, the better your ability to recover function after a stroke,' says Richard Mahoney, president of Phybotics, a robotics startup in Westmont, NJ. But if patients can function - even one-handed - their insurance firms may tell them that their rehabilitation is done. And if training is overly focused on a few very specific tasks, it may even impede a more general recovery.

Enter rehabilitation robots, which can ease the therapist's load by delivering certain treatments very efficiently, in some cases, achieving dramatically better results than conventional therapy alone.

This article does not engender any love for insurance companies, does it? "But if patients can function - even one-handed - their insurance firms may tell them that their rehabilitation is done" is not a happy sentence.

But the point is that robots are better than human therapists in many cases today, and apparently insurance companies are happy to pay for the robots, so the robots will win. Most human physical therapists will eventually be out of work as the robots get better and better. See Robotic Nation for details. See also this post.