Game Theory: A Potential Tool for the Design and Analysis of Patient-Robot Interaction Strategies

Designing suitable robotic controllers for automating movement-based rehabilitation therapy requires an understanding of the interaction between patient and therapist. Current approaches do not take into account the highly dynamic and interdependent nature of this relationship. A better understanding can be accomplished through framing the interaction as a problem in game theory. The main strength behind this approach is the potential to develop robotic control systems which automatically adapt to patient interaction behavior. Agents learn from experiences, and adapt their behaviors so they are better suited to their environment. As the models evolve, structures, patterns and behaviors emerge that were not explicitly programmed into the original models, but which instead surface through the agent interactions with each other and their environment. This paper advocates the use of such agent based models for analysing patient-therapist interactions with a view to designing more efficient and effective robotic controllers for automated therapeutic intervention in motor rehabilitation. The authors demonstrate in a simplified implementation the effectiveness of this approach through simulating known behavioral patterns observed in real patient-therapist interactions, such as learned dependency.