A Gravity-Compensated Upper-Limb Exoskeleton for Functional Rehabilitation of the Shoulder Complex

Abstract

In the last decade, several exoskeletons for shoulder rehabilitation have been presented in the literature. Most of these devices focus on the shoulder complex and limit the normal mobility of the rest of the body, forcing the patient into a fixed standing or sitting position. Nevertheless, this severely limits the range of activities that can potentially be simulated during the rehabilitation, preventing the execution of occupational therapy which involves the execution of tasks based on activities of daily living (ADLs). These tasks involve different muscular groups and whole-body movements, such as, e.g., picking up objects from the ground. To enable whole-body functional rehabilitation, the challenge is to shift the paradigm of robotic rehabilitation towards machines that can enable wide workspaces and high mobility. In this perspective, here we present Float: an upper-limb exoskeleton designed to promote and accelerate the motor and functional recovery of the shoulder joint complex following post-traumatic or post-surgical injuries. Indeed, Float allows the patient to move freely in a very large workspace. The key component that enables this is a passive polyarticulated arm which supports the total exoskeleton weight and allows the patient to move freely in space, empowering rehabilitation through a deeper interaction with the surrounding environment. A characterization of the reachable workspace of both the exoskeleton and the polyarticulated passive arm is presented. These results support the conclusion that a patient wearing Float can perform a wide variety of ADLs without bearing its weight.

ANYexo 2.0: A Fully Actuated Upper-Limb Exoskeleton for Manipulation and Joint-Oriented Training in All Stages of Rehabilitation

“…where the contribution of the coupled SC joints to the velocity is incorporated by the added coupling terms in (31). 5) Torque Conversion: When applying the derived conversion Jacobian J CE to convert torques using (35), we observe, that τ EXO GPR ̸ = τ CJC GPR and τ EXO GPR ̸ = τ CJC GPR which was to be expected due to the parallel structure of the CJC shoulder coordinates. To give an intuition: the SC-torques in EXO representation act on the SC joint and support the GH joint, the SC-torques in CJC representation are only acting on the SC joint.…”

“…Devices published in the state of the art put little focus on ADL training including interactions of the hand with the environment and the own body [14], [24] and exception is presented by Buccelli et al [35]. Exoskeletons built for strength augmentation in industrial or defense applications usually have not guided the hand orientation (i.e., no wrist DOF) or did not allow direct interaction with the environment as the loads are too high for the human structure.…”

Innovative Metaheuristic Optimization Approach with a Bi-Triad for Rehabilitation Exoskeletons

“…During physical rehabilitation treatments, practical and biomechanically effective devices are required to enable manual activities. Therefore, to increase their adoptability, usability and safety, various methodologies have been implemented to develop exoskeletons, highlighting those based on bio-inspired models and real scenarios [12][13][14]. For these reasons, developing an exoskeleton is a multidisciplinary challenge that requires the collaboration of patients, medical specialists and exoskeleton developers.…”

Beyond Digital Twins: Phygital Twins for Neuroergonomics in Human-Robot Interaction

“…This would make such an output a peculiar type of digital biomarker (Wright et al, 2017 ): a “phygital biomarker” or possibly, a “neurophygital biomarker” (a promising step in this direction is based on neuromechanical biomarkers for rehabilomics) (Garro et al, 2021 ). In line with this reasoning, we could think about “neurophygital twins” to extract biomarkers from the activity of their PTs: mechatronic devices like rehabilitative exoskeletons (Buccelli et al, 2022 ) or, possibly, any other robot (including humanoids) designed to interact with humans wearing sensors.…”