A Bilateral Upper Limb Rehabilitation Device for Home Use

Abstract

Current upper limb rehabilitation for stroke patients is based on a conventional physical therapy supervised by therapists. The most of the robot-based rehabilitation is developing under a bulky machine which is not suitable for home use. High rehabilitation fees and inconvenience in use lead patients from ordinary home to miss the suitable time in rehabilitation. This research explores an end-effector device which is light and suitable for the home environment. By balancing the contradiction of device function achievement and ordinary home use, this 3 DOF rehabilitation device is the appropriate choice for the current situation. Different with other low-cost devices in the markets, it can provide an assistant force in the recovery process. It makes severe patients can take passive rehabilitation exercises under totally device leading and minor stroke patients take active rehabilitation exercises by their own intention. After studying the upper limb motions in normal physical actions, the joint movement in those motions is discussed with details. Some effective recovery tasks are achieved by analyzing the conventional physical exercise for stroke. The research of human-machine interaction is conducted to reveal a method in interaction tasks design. The new version of device is designed and has the potential for better performance in structural stability, but the development in software and testing of new strategies are implemented on the old version because of funding issue. Different recovery patterns with different control strategies are exploited and compared in this article to select the appropriate training model in upper limb rehabilitation. The approach of novel human-machine interface, control strategy and upper limb recovery strategy built in this research offers a potential inspiration in upper limb rehabilitation device development.