Development of a therapeutic robot for use in the rehabilitation of impaired limbs.

摘要

The rehabilitation of stroke victims is an expensive and time consuming procedure. Recently research has started to look for new ways to assist in the rehabilitation of impaired limbs. Robots may have the ability to reduce costs while increasing the quality and quantity of therapy. This work covers the preliminary mechanical design of a therapeutic robot, designed with the use of anthropometric data to be able to manipulate both the upper and lower limb of a patient. The design and application of an upper limb biomechanical model for assessing and monitoring trajectory, position, orientation, force and torque generated during robot-assisted therapy. The model fuses the sensory data from a six degrees of freedom (6-DOF) force sensor and 3D pose sensors, that are attached to the upper limb, along with a mathematical model of the human arm consisting 3-DOF shoulder joint and 2-DOF elbow joint. A prototype robotic system is built to implement 4 different robot control modes and a visual feedback system. Each control mode is capable of allowing the patient and robot to have different levels of control over the therapeutic exercise based on the patient's level of impairment.