Doctoral candidate, Kate Tsui, will give a talk at the workshop on "Good Experimental Methodology in Robotics" at the 2009 Robotics: Science and Systems conference in Seattle, WA on June 28. Her talk will focus on establishing clinical credibility for rehabilitation and assistive robots through experimental design.

Abstract:

The number of clinical trials using robots has increased over the last ten years. It is not practical for all experiments to be clinical trials through the development cycle of a rehabilitation or assistive robot. How can system developers incorporate aspects of the clinical trials to gain credibility among clinicians during development period evaluations?

We begin a discussion about how to bridge the gap between pre-clinical experiments and Phase 1 clinical trials using rehabilitation and assistive robots. We examine the importance of clearly defined inclusion and exclusion criterion. We also discuss establishing a baseline either with a control group or pre-experiment evaluation and the necessity for first conducting experiments with able-bodied participants. Also, we discuss the need for a common language between the system developers and the clinicians.