Developing and maintaining an ontology for rehabilitation robotics

Representing the available information about rehabilitation robots in a structured form, like ontologies, facilitates access to various kinds of information about the existing robots, and thus it is important both from the point of view of rehabilitation robotics and from the point of view of physical medicine. Rehabilitation robotics researchers can learn various properties of the existing robots and access to the related publications to further improve the state-of-the-art. Physical medicine experts can find information about rehabilitation robots and related publications (possibly including results of clinical studies) to better identify the right robot for a particular therapy or patient population. Therefore, considering also the advantages of ontologies and ontological reasoning, such as interoperability of various heterogenous knowledge resources (e.g., patient databases or disease ontologies), such an ontology provides the underlying mechanisms for translational physical medi cine, from bench-to-bed and back, and personalized rehabilitation robotics. With these motivations, we have designed and developed the first formal rehabilitation robotics ontology, called REHABROBO-ONTO, in OWL, collaborating with experts in robotics and in physical medicine. We have also built a software (called REHABROBO-QUERY) with an easy-to-use intelligent user-interface that allows robot designers to add/modify information about their rehabilitation robots to/from REHABROBO-ONTO.