Currently, full body exoskeletons still lack movabili-ty in their back and shoulder parts, resulting in limited applicability in, e.g., nursing care. An exoske-letal spine and shoulder mechanism called “exo-spine” has therefore been developed with the purpose of allowing 3 degree of freedom (DOF) spinal motion and 2 DOF shoulder girdle abduction. It consists of a mechanism of vertebras, shoulder blades, and two cables for actuation such that only one motor is requir-ed. Control equations were obtained through measurements and friction analysis. Experiments were performed with a subject wearing the exo-spine in a simplified full body exoskeleton. The wearer was able to lift up to 40 kg using all DOF of the system. From this we confirmed the exo-spine’s 5 DOF movability and lifting performance. Next, the exo-spine will be installed in HAL exoskeletons in order to increase their usabili-ty in health care settings.

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The scientific and medical community is becoming more and more interested in the so-called Rehabilitation Robotics. Rehabilitation Robotics has been envisioned as technology for the restoration and functional compensation of people suffering from physical disability or disorders, either for the rehabilitation therapy or assistance of people.

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Rehabilitation Robotics has been defined as the combination of industrial robotics and medical rehabilitation, thus encompassing many areas, including mechanical and electrical engineering, biomedical engineering, artificial intelligence and sensor and actuator technology. Medical rehabilitation often refers to the process by which human function, be it physical or cognitive, is restored at least partially to their “normal” condition.

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This book started with an introduction to Rehabilitation Robotics and, in particular, of Rehabilitation Wearable Robots of which Exoskeletons are very interesting examples. A historical note that dated back to the late 1960’s the first work on Rehabilitation Robotics was given in Chapter 1. Even though this represents already more than 40 years of work in the area, when looking to publications and scientific contributions in the field, one might say that it is still in its infancy.

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A great deal of effort has been devoted in the past decades in the generic area of tremor management. Specific topics of modelling for objective classification of pathological tremor out of kinematics and physiological data, compensatory technologies and evaluation rating tools are just a few examples of application field. This chapter introduces a comprehensive review of research work in this generic field during the last decades. In particular special focus has been put on the systems approach and thus a specific section on modelling has been included. Aspects related to experimental protocol and tremor pattern identification are reviewed in detail with the aim of drawing a practical guideline when compensatory technology has to be developed. The current status on ambulatory and non-ambulatory tremor reduction technologies is given in the section devoted to tremor management. At the end, we finish our discussion with those aspects related to tremor evaluation.

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