Fit4MedRob: A Next-Generation Platform for Intelligent Robotic Rehabilitation

The Fit4MedRob initiative ('Fit for Medical Robotics') is a large-scale, multi-partner project funded by the Italian Ministry of University and Research under the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (NRRP). It involves 25 partners, including research institutions, clinical centers, and industrial companies, with the goal of integrating advanced robotic technologies into rehabilitation and assistive care. Within this initiative, Mission 2 - Activity 5 (Match Making #53) specifically targets the development and validation of a robotic protocol for the rehabilitation of post-stroke hemispatial inattention (HI), a disabling condition characterized by the inability to perceive and/or attend to one side of the peripersonal space. This paper presents the design and preliminary evaluation of a modular robotic system based on the TIAGo platform, a collaborative mobile manipulator developed by PAL Robotics. The architecture integrates five key modules: navigation, patient identification, interaction, therapy delivery, and response evaluation. A series of preliminary tests were conducted with healthy participants to validate core components of the system, including autonomous navigation accuracy, real-time face recognition based on ROS4HRI (Robot Operating System for Human-Robot Interaction), and head pose estimation exploiting the MediaPipe library, validated against a ground truth provided by stereophotogrammetric measures. Results confirm the feasibility of the proposed system and support its future application in clinical trials.