4. Discussion
stroke, fatigue, Kawasaki
STROKE, SYNDROME, KAWASAKI
The use of robots in rehabilitation gained significant traction in 1990 [Villafañe et al. [Some other authors found that robot-assisted rehabilitation can be more efficient than traditional rehabilitation. Dehem et al. [As stated previously, the majority of available studies using robots in rehabilitation were conducted on stroke patients; however, a few authors compared using rehabilitation robots with conventional rehabilitation on patients with different conditions. Kawasaki et al. [According to the available literature, rehabilitation using robots shows either similar effectiveness to classic rehabilitation, which is consistent with our results, or higher effectiveness than classic rehabilitation. The cost-effectiveness of this type of intervention remains an open issue that requires further research.To our knowledge, the current study is the first clinical trial to compare the effectiveness of traditional neurological rehabilitation and neurological rehabilitation combined with a rehabilitation robot for patients with post-COVID-19 fatigue syndrome. We consider this as a strength of this study. However, the study has some limitations. Due to the setting, we are not able to calculate the realistic cost-effectiveness of the intervention because participants had to undergo the whole rehabilitation process, and rather than achieving the predetermined goal, their improvement was measured. A further limitation results from organizational and financial reasons, due to which only exercises of the upper limb were performed using the EMG-driven robotic device.Human–robot interaction (HRI) is studied mainly in the area of social robotics. HRI may be different when a non-humanoid rehabilitation robot is used, like the one in the current study. Hertz and Wieze [