Nowadays, knee surgery is a relatively common procedure used to treat cartilage defects and/or soft tissue lesions, osteoarthritis
with total or unicondylar knee arthroplasty, and cruciate ligaments (ACL/PCL) injuries.
After surgery, each patient undergoes a long period of rehabilitation (typically from 6 weeks to 6 months) consisting of long
sessions of physiotherapy and medical training therapy carried out by qualified personnel. This procedure is long and expensive, and
may cause work-related pathologies to physiotherapists because of the significant workload it implies. These considerations
highlight the high potential benefits that robotic solutions could bring in this field. As a matter of fact, if technology could
provide an effective tool to assist the physiotherapist, the rehabilitation time and cost could be reduced, with important benefits for
both the patients and the operators.
Although some knee rehabilitation devices are already available, they have proved to be not very effective and, in some
situations, could even harm the patient. The main reason of this is related to the over simplistic and non-physiological assumptions used
for the device design: the first one is to consider the knee as a 1 Degree of Freedom joint enabling only flexion-extension.
Second, these devices constrain the knee to “blindly” perform movements with very few adaptations to the patients’ anatomy and
muscular reaction. 
This project aims to solve this issue by investigating it from a biomechanical and robotic perspective, considering human
physiology patient-specific knee kinematics and kinetics as the starting point of the design.