IIT Madras's Portable Robot Brings Stroke Hand Therapy to the Bedside

Stroke rehabilitation in India usually starts with the legs, because a patient who can't stand can't go home. The hand gets attention later, and it needs a physiotherapist sitting beside the patient, moving the wrist and fingers through the same motion hundreds of times. India doesn't have enough therapists for that.

A device built in Chennai is trying to fix that.

What PLUTO-H is

PLUTO-H (Plug and Train Robot for Hand Rehabilitation) comes from IIT Madras's TTK Center for Rehabilitation Research and Device Development, known on campus as R2D2. The lab is led by Professor Sujatha Srinivasan, and the robot was co-developed with CMC Vellore. It will reach patients through Thryv Rehab, a startup incubated at IIT Madras.

A few design choices stand out:

• It goes to the patient. Most rehabilitation robots are large machines in specialist centres. PLUTO-H is portable enough to use from a hospital bed early in recovery and can go home with the patient.
• One motor, interchangeable handles. A single device trains wrist bending, forearm rotation and hand opening and closing.
• Adaptive assistance. It helps only as much as the hand needs, stepping back when the patient can manage and stepping in when they tire.
• Therapy as games. Hand movement controls on-screen games that get harder as the patient improves, because the most common way rehab fails is that people stop doing the repetitions.

Multiplying the therapist, not replacing one

Professor Sujatha says plainly that the ratio of therapists to patients in India is very poor. In the PLUTO-H model, the therapist assesses the patient, sets up the robot and customises the programme, then moves to the next bed while the device continues the session. Therapy stays supervised; it isn't meant to run unattended.

Where it stands

• IIT Madras said in 2025 that the robot was in routine use at about 11 clinics and had been used by more than 1,000 patients.
• The product has its required certifications and is available for sale now, with a formal launch planned before the end of the year.
• The team is installing it at a few centres first, so there's somewhere to send patients once word spreads.

The lab-to-startup route

Assistive hardware in India is a hard market: fragmented, price-sensitive and expensive to build for. Professor Sujatha's own description is that "hardware is a monster." The R2D2 approach puts startups in the IIT Madras Research Park, where they use the campus's prototyping and testing facilities and the institute carries much of the R&D cost. The aim is a middle ground between cheap devices that users reject and imported ones that are expensive to buy and service.

The same route could work well beyond rehab. Chennai has the engineering depth and the clinical partners (CMC Vellore is two hours away) to turn lab research into certified medical devices. What's usually missing is the step from prototype to certified product. PLUTO-H has made that step.

Source: India Today — Plug, train, recover: PLUTO, the IIT Madras robot that brings hand therapy home