  Individuals with diverse motor abilities often benefit from intensive and
specialized rehabilitation therapies aimed at enhancing their functional
recovery. Nevertheless, the challenge lies in the restricted availability of
neurorehabilitation professionals, hindering the effective delivery of the
necessary level of care. Robotic devices hold great potential in reducing the
dependence on medical personnel during therapy but, at the same time, they
generally lack the crucial human interaction and motivation that traditional
in-person sessions provide. To bridge this gap, we introduce an AI-based system
aimed at delivering personalized, out-of-hospital assistance during
neurorehabilitation training. This system includes a rehabilitation training
device, affective signal classification models, training exercises, and a
socially interactive agent as the user interface. With the assistance of a
professional, the envisioned system is designed to be tailored to accommodate
the unique rehabilitation requirements of an individual patient. Conceptually,
after a preliminary setup and instruction phase, the patient is equipped to
continue their rehabilitation regimen autonomously in the comfort of their
home, facilitated by a socially interactive agent functioning as a virtual
coaching assistant. Our approach involves the integration of an interactive
socially-aware virtual agent into a neurorehabilitation robotic framework, with
the primary objective of recreating the social aspects inherent to in-person
rehabilitation sessions. We also conducted a feasibility study to test the
framework with healthy patients. The results of our preliminary investigation
indicate that participants demonstrated a propensity to adapt to the system.
Notably, the presence of the interactive agent during the proposed exercises
did not act as a source of distraction; instead, it positively impacted users'
engagement.
