A safe, purely dissipative, robotic device and method for rehabilitation of large whole body movements, for example, in stroke victims. Shifting to passive actuation fundamentally changes common control strategies that work well for active devices. The novel approach distorts visual feedback to the subjects as a first step to achieve the desired controllability hereto limited by passivity constraints. With visual distortion, a subject's arm trajectory can be altered in a way that passive actuation alone cannot. Results show that subjects involuntarily changed their path motion up to 30% with distortion applied. This ability to steer user's movements can be harnessed to offset controllability issues.
VISUAL DISTORTION IN A VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENT TO ALTER OR GUIDE PATH MOVEMENT