Assisted Rehabilitation by Robotic Orthosis of Spinal Cord and Back Injuries

摘要

This study addressed the design, construction and control of a prototype of active orthosis focused on assisting the rehabilitation of patients with spinal cord or/and back illnesses. The prototype was actuated with a collection of direct current motor commanded by distributed control strategy based on the so-called Twisting controller. This control action used a Super-Twisting algorithm as robust differentiator to supply the time derivative of the tracking error. A graphic user interface (GUI) was implemented to enforce the application of different therapies accordingly to the most common strategies used in clinical rehabilitation. The orthosis was implemented and the proposed controller forced the tracking of the reference trajectories supplied by the GUI. The orthosis was evaluated in simulation to adjust the controllers and differentiators gains. A real orthosis was constructed and controlled Using the gains obtained at the simulation stage. The actual orthosis was evaluated to check the ability of the controller to track the reference trajectory despite the resistance of the patient that was simulated by different dummies devices.