Individuals with diverse motor abilities often benefit from intensive and specialized rehabilitation therapies aimed at enhancing their functional recovery. Nevertheless, the challenge lies in the restricted availability of neurorehabilitation professionals, hindering the effective delivery of the necessary level of care. Robotic devices hold great potential in reducing the dependence on medical personnel during therapy but, at the same time, they generally lack the crucial human interaction and motivation that traditional in-person sessions provide. To bridge this gap, we introduce an AI-based system aimed at delivering personalized, out-of-hospital assistance during neurorehabilitation training. This system includes a rehabilitation training device, affective signal classification models, training exercises, and a socially interactive agent as the user interface. With the assistance of a professional, the envisioned system is designed to be tailored to accommodate the unique rehabilitation requirements of an individual patient. Conceptually, after a preliminary setup and instruction phase, the patient is equipped to continue their rehabilitation regimen autonomously in the comfort of their home, facilitated by a socially interactive agent functioning as a virtual coaching assistant. Our approach involves the integration of an interactive socially-aware virtual agent into a neurorehabilitation robotic framework, with the primary objective of recreating the social aspects inherent to in-person rehabilitation sessions. We also conducted a feasibility study to test the framework with healthy patients. The results of our preliminary investigation indicate that participants demonstrated a propensity to adapt to the system. Notably, the presence of the interactive agent during the proposed exercises did not act as a source of distraction; instead, it positively impacted users' engagement.

通过整合交互式的社交感知虚拟助理到神经康复机器人框架中，本研究的主要目标是重现与面对面康复会议相关的社交方面。我们还进行了一项可行性研究，测试了健康患者对该框架的反应，初步结果表明参与者表现出了适应系统的倾向。值得注意的是，在所提出的锻炼中，交互式助理的存在并没有分散注意力，而是积极地促进了用户的参与度。

机器人神经康复训练的社交互动代理：概念提出与概念验证研究