The research objectives of this 3-year project, are: 1) The development of a robotic device, called Robotic Gait Rehabilitation (RGR) Trainer, which will generate force-fields applied at the patient?s pelvic area to facilitate treadmill gait retraining in patients with abnormal gait patterns; 2) The design and implementation of high level impedance control strategies to achieve a smooth human-robot interaction thus facilitating gait retraining; 3) The testing of the RGR Trainer for treadmill gait retraining in post-stroke patients, integrating the novel haptic feedback in the pel-vic area with previously developed visual feedback. The intellectual merit of the proposed pro-ject is the study of patient-robot interaction via haptic feedback provided through the pelvis and the study of the integration of haptic and visual feedback modalities during robot-assisted reha-bilitation in post-stroke patients. The educational, broader impact and outreach activities of this project are: 1) The initiation of undergraduate students in rehabilitation robotics; 2) The establishment of collaborative projects on biomedical engineering and robotics with Massachusetts high schools; 3) The organization of a special session on robotics and treadmill gait retraining at a major conference; 4) The estab-lishment of a webpage in the area of robotic and treadmill gait rehabilitation devices.
