The purpose of this study is to gather evidence on safety and overall effectiveness of three alternative technologies for gait rehabilitation in diplegic children with Cerebral Palsy: robotic, conventional and joint conventional and robotic gait training.

A new methodology, decision-oriented health technology assessment (DoHTA), was applied to assess the technology on clinical, technical, organizational, economic, social and ethical, legal and safety domains. This method, conceived as a hospital-based HTA tool for supporting the introduction of innovative technologies, has been implemented merging the EUnetHTA Core Model® with the Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis. In particular, the general items of the EUnetHTA Core Model® are re-formulated as performance indicators and re-placed along a decision tree structure that, from the one hand, respects the original top-down design of the EUnetHTA model (growing level of detail from domains to issues) and, from the other hand, allows obtaining a quantitative evaluation of each identified performance indicator.

The multiple indicators, which have been identified for the seven domains, play important and different roles in the alternative technologies evaluation. DoHTA results showed that robotic system offers the possibility to control more accurately the exerted forces and movement trajectories than the traditional therapy. It gives the possibility to measure the task performances parameters and to receive the patient feedback simultaneously. To carry out robotic gait rehabilitation fewer therapists are required compared with the conventional therapy, resulting in lower therapists’ physical workload.

Despite the great perspectives that robotics offer to motor rehabilitation, it seems that robotic gait training could not provide greater benefits in terms of motor and functional recovery compared to the conventional therapy. Preliminary results, supported by most recent literature evidence, lead to the hypothesis that joint use of robotic and conventional therapy can produce better clinical outcomes than the separate use of the two rehabilitation techniques.