3DOF Intelligent Rehabilitation Robot Design for Knee and Ankle

Journal of Intelligent Manufacturing, 2009

There is an increasing trend in using robots for medical purposes. One specific area is the rehabilitation. There are some commercial exercise machines used for rehabilitation purposes. However, these machines have limited use because of their insufficient motion freedom. In addition, these types of machines are not actively controlled and therefore can not accommodate complicated exercises required during rehabilitation. In this study, a rule based intelligent control methodology is proposed to imitate the faculties of an experienced physiotherapist. These involve interpretation of patient reactions, storing the information received, acting according to the available data, and learning from the previous experiences. Robot manipulator is driven by a servo motor and controlled by a computer using force/torque and position sensor information. Impedance control technique is selected for the force control.

2021

The ankle structure holds one of the most important role in the human biomechanics. Due to complexity of everyday activities this joint is the most prone to be injured part of the lower limb. This fact motivated the designing of a rehabilitation robotic system, which could be able of helping/assisting the physiotherapist, in order to obtain an efficient recovery process. A novel ankle rehabilitation device was developed, allowing progress monitoring by therapists. Some structural, kinematic and designing aspects regarding this rehabilitation system are discussed in this paper. Also, preliminary experimental results and evaluation of first patient are presented. Future trials are required to establish the maximum clinical efficiency of this platform in ankle joint rehabilitation.

2011

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Journal of Engineering Studies and Research

Among lower limb injuries, the ankle joint is the most common injured in sports and daily life in general. Rehabilitation aims to recover the patient’s physical capabilities through long and repetitive exercises. This paper discusses structural and kinematic aspects of a novel ankle rehabilitation device, which can facilitate the recovery of the ankle joint. The proposed device has two degrees of freedom, and will ensure functionality with minimum dimensions. Some preliminary mathematical models are also presented.

This paper presents the mechanical design and evaluation of a knee–ankle–foot robot, which is compact, modular and portable for stroke patients to carry out overground gait training at outpatient and home settings. A novel compact series elastic actuator (SEA) is developed for safe human–robot interactions. As a solution to the limitation of conventional SEA designs, one low-stiffness translational spring and a high-stiffness torsion spring are placed in series for force transmission. The springs are selected based on gait biomechanics to maintain a high intrinsic compliance for most period of a gait cycle, while retaining the capacity to provide the peak force. To achieve portability, the robotic joint mechanism is optimized based on gait biomechanics, and the mechanical structure is built with lightweight materials. This robot demonstrates stable and accurate force control in experiments conducted on healthy subjects with overground walking. The activation level of the major leg muscles of subjects is reduced as indicated by the EMG signals and the normal gait pattern is maintained during the test, which demonstrates that the robot can provide effective assistive force to the subjects during overground walking.

2018

"The Stroke has become the top ten leading cause of death. The serious patient will pass away. The light patient of stroke will lose the ability of one-side limb action. It will cause a lot of inconvenience for the caregivers and the family members. At the same time, it will be the burden on society. Based on the above reason, an intelligent wearable rehabilitation robotics is developed in this manuscript. In the golden recovery period, using the mechanical power to help the patient to repeat the flexion and stretching rehabilitation. It can effectively avoid the limb contracture. At the same time, in order to avoid the sports injuries, the EMG (electromyography) is used as feedback signal. It will detect the situation of muscle of the patient. Then, according to the situation, the robotics will automatically tune the travel length of the rehabilitation. Finally, prototype of the rehabilitation robotics will be implemented. The operation of the robotics will be shown in this manuscript. Chin-Wen Chuang | Meng-Hsiu Wu | Kuan-Yu Chen""Research and Implementation of Innovated Rehabilitation Robotics Manipulators"" Published in International Journal of Trend in Scientific Research and Development (ijtsrd), ISSN: 2456-6470, Volume-1 | Issue-4 , June 2017, URL: http://www.ijtsrd.com/papers/ijtsrd2207.pdf Article URL: http://www.ijtsrd.com/other-scientific-research-area/other/2207/research-and-implementation-of-innovated-rehabilitation-robotics-manipulators/chin-wen-chuang"

International Journal of Engineering & Technology, 2018

Wearable devices such as exoskeletons are being opted frequently during rehabilitation processes for the post stroke recovery. Such devices are playing important role in the development of assistive rehabilitation robotic systems. In this paper three control strategies MPC and LQR and PID are introduced which were applied to knee joint of lower limb exoskeleton model for passive exercise. The two controls MPC and LQR are model based control which empowers them for stable responses. In this paper the analysis of robustness of control is done under the noisy and disturbance conditions. The results showed good performance of the exoskeleton model with the applied controls in the provided condition. In the future work the applied controls will be implemented on hardware.

Journal of Mechanical Engineering and Sciences

Since 1960s, the development of exoskeleton robots have been advancing in the applications such as load carrying, walking endurance, physical assistance and rehabilitation therapy. Rehabilitation therapy in itself is related to walking ability restoration; especially for the elder people. A survey by The United Nations in 2017 revealed increase trend in the number of ageing population. Due to ageing, it may cause weakened limbs, lower limb injuries or disabilities resulting in walking impairment. Elder people suffering from walking impairment will need to undergo walking therapy to recover walking ability. A walking rehabilitation exoskeleton robot can be used for such patients to undergo the therapy by wearing it on their lower body. A lower limb exoskeleton effectiveness for gait recovery assessment in the design stage is not truly explored yet. This can be done by obtaining the simulation model of the lower limb exoskeleton robot structure from its CAD design. The gait pattern tr...

IOP Conference Series: Materials Science and Engineering, 2013

It is a general assumption that robotics will play an important role in therapy activities within rehabilitation treatment. In the last decade, the interest in the field has grown exponentially mainly due to the initial success of the early systems and the growing demand caused by increasing numbers of stroke patients and their associate rehabilitation costs. As a result, robot therapy systems have been developed worldwide for training of both the upper and lower extremities. This paper investigates and proposes a lower-limb rehabilitation robot that is used to help patients with lower-limb paralysis to improve and resume physical functions. The proposed rehabilitation robot features three rotary joints forced by electric motors providing linear motions. The paper covers mechanism design and optimization, kinematics analysis, trajectory planning, wearable sensors, and the control system design. The design and control system demonstrate that the proposed rehabilitation robot is safe and reliable with the effective design and better kinematic performance..

A control system framework of lower extremity rehabilitation exoskeleton robot is presented. It is based on the Neuro-Musculo-Skeletal biological model. Its core composition moudle, the motion intent parser part, mainly comprises of three distinct parts.The first part is signal acquisition of surface electromyography (sEMG) that is the summation of motor unit action potential (MUAP) starting from central nervous system (CNS). sEMG can be used to decode action intent of operator to make the patient actively participate in specific training. As another composition part, a muscle dynamics model that is comprised of activation and contraction dynamic model is developed. It is mainly used to calculate muscle force. The last part is the skeletal dynamic model that is simplified as a linked segment mechanics. Combined with muscle dynamic model, the joint torque exerted by internal muscles can be exported, which can be ued to do a exoskeleton controller design. The developed control framework can make exoskeleton offer assistance to operators during rehabilitation by guiding motions on correct training rehabilitation trajectories, or give force support to be able to perform certain motions. Though the presentation is orientated towards the lower extremity exoskeleton, itis generic and can be applied to almost any part of the human body.