Desirable Difficulty in a Robotic Therapy Regimen Based on Performance and Affect

INTRODUCTION Robotic therapy, with its unique advantages over a human therapist, is an appealing option to minimize patients’ recovery time. Massed practice and means of amplifying its positive effectsvia a robotic interface (i.e., error augmentation of the patient’s reaching trajectory) has been extensively studied. However, even with utilizing suchneuro-rehabilitation paradigms, therapy robots still have two major challenges: sustaining the patient’s motivation to continue therapy and the need for a therapist to set up the therapy session based on each patient’s physical and emotional states.