Representing the available information about rehabilitation robots in a structured form, as an ontology, 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 heterogeneous knowledge resources (e.g., patient databases or disease ontologies), such an ontology provides the underlying mechanisms for translational physical medicine, from bench-to-bed and back, and personalized rehabilitation robotics. With these motivations, the first formal rehabilitation robotics ontology, called REHABROBO-ONTO, is designed and developed, collaborating with experts in robotics and in physical medicine. A web based software (called REHABROBO-QUERY) with an easy-to-use intelligent user-interface is also built. REHABROBO-QUERY allows robot designers to add/modify information about their rehabilitation robots to/from REHABROBO-ONTO. The ontology system consisting of REHABROBO-ONTO and REHABROBO-QUERY is made available on the cloud, utilizing Amazon Web services, to provide a reliable environment for access, development and maintenance of REHABROBO-ONTO by rehabilitation robot designers and physical medicine experts around the world. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
