Based upon the view that walking is a highly social act, i.e. “grounding” oneself in the realities, not just the medium of “moving,” this paper explores robot-assisted rehabilitation and patients’ aspirations concerning it. Fieldwork conducted in rehabilitation hospitals and disability centers in South Korea, reveals that rehabilitative medicine settles uneasily on the notion of neuroplasticity as a theoretical tool to legitimize robot-assisted therapy sessions, in the absence both of upstream treatment options such as stem cell therapy and their discernible benefits over human-based intervention. The patient’s clear preference to walk rather than to move, and hence to regain the whole package of sociality associated with the bodily technique underlies their high expectations toward robots. Under these insights, the paper argues that, for the field to enhance its clinical impact, the current regime focused on mechanical, or neurophysiological, aspects of walking should incorporate elements vitalizing the sociality constitutive of it.
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The discourse surrounding population aging is driving growth in care and rehabilitation robotics (Neven and Leeson Citation2015), while the sector is also being prompted by clinical insights such as positive evidence regarding the application of robots in patients’ rehabilitation (e.g. Chang and Kim Citation2013). The aforementioned studies highlight how the use of robots has benefits, given their calibrated routines and sophisticated sensors. This is based on the notion of “neuroplasticity,” wherein the death of one area in a neural network is compensated by alternative pathways generated by repeated exercises involving the affected limbs (Bogue Citation2018). Despite lagging in the speed of deployment behind surgical robots (Morone et al. Citation2017: 1308), the utilization of robots is increasing in rehabilitation, aided particularly by the developments in artificial intelligence. The hype generated by these robots, often through images of patients with limb paralysis being overjoyed at walking with exoskeletons, is not generally translated into long-term clinical outcomes discernibly better than conventional human-based therapies (Iosa et al. Citation2012). However, given the pervasive techno-optimism, it is clear that these devices continue to be developed, generating a need to evaluate their future direction.
