An Articulated Rehabilitation Robot for Upper Limb Physiotherapy and Training
Date Issued
2010
Date
2010
Author(s)
Tsai, Bing-Chun
Abstract
Cerebral vascular disease (or stroke) is the leading cause of functional disabilities in adults. Approximately half of the stroke survivors continue to have severe neurological deficits and hemiparesis in the upper extremities (UE), and many secondary complications due to immobilization also occur. In order to develop successful stroke rehabilitation therapies, the robot-assisted therapy has been studied recently due to insensitive training it involves while saving significant labor consumption. This research work is to design an upper limb rehab-robot with a simple mechanical structure but of multiple degrees of freedom (DOFs). Features of the rehab-robot are including exoskeleton-type design, the redundancy design, the guidance control system, and the force feedback with EMG-trigger. The exoskeleton-type system is a kind of external mechanism whose joints correspond to those of human upper-limbs. The design of more DOFs results in problem of redundancy which can be solved by selecting appropriate inverse kinematic solutions. There are three rehabilitation modes of this rehab-robot that can be chosen by physical therapists for operation according to the severity of upper-limb impairment of the stroke patient, namely, passive mode, active mode, and guidance mode. In particular, the guidance mode can provide patients with assistance to execute motor training such as a program of circle drawing, which is a complex movement that coordinates use of both shoulder and elbow joints, meant to be a skill control to relearn functional tasks after stroke. Extensive experiments have been conducted to demonstrate the performance of the developed rehab-robot, and promising results have verified its effectiveness.
Subjects
Rehabilitation
Exoskeleton
Kinematics
Robot-assisted therapy
SDGs
Type
thesis
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