Arm rehabilitation with a robotic exoskeleleton in Virtual Reality

Abstract

Several studies demonstrate the importance of an early, constant and intensive rehabilitation following cerebral accidents. This kind of therapy is an expensive procedure in terms of human resources and time, and the increase of both life expectance of world population and incidence of stroke is making the administration of such therapies more and more important. The development of new robotic devices for rehabilitation can help to reduce this cost and lead to new effective therapeutic procedures. In this paper we present an exoskeleton for the robotic-assisted rehabilitation of the upper limb. This article describes the main issues in the design of an exoskeletal robot with high performance, in terms of backdrivability, low inertia, large workspace isomorphic to the human arm and high payload to weight ratio. The implementation of three different robotic schemes of therapy in virtual reality with this exoskeleton, based on an impedance control architecture, are presented and discussed in detail. Finally the experimental results of a preliminary evaluation of functionality of the system carried out on one patient are presented, and compared with the performance in the execution of the exercise obtained with healthy volunteers. Moreover, other preliminary results from an extended pilot clinical study with the L-Exos are reported and discussed. © 2007 IEEE

Anthropomorphic mechanical design and Lyapunov-based control of a new shoulder rehabilitation system

“…ARMin I can be stated as semi-exoskeleton robot since it has combined end-effector based structure with exoskleton structure. Krebs et al (1998), Hesse et al (2003), Carignan et al (2005), Frisoli et al (2007) and Mihelj et al (2007), implemented impedance control for active rehabilitation. Mihelj et al (2007) implemented PD control and computed torque control (CTC) to passively guide the patient's arm through a predefined trajectory.…”

“…MIT-MANUS (Krebs et al, 1998), Mirror Image Motion Enabler (MIME) (Lum et al, 2006), GENTLE/s (Loureiro et al, 2003), Bi-Manu-Track (Hesse et al, 2003), Assisted Rehabilitation and Measurement (ARM) guide (Reinkensmeyer et al, 2003) and REHAROB therapy system (Toth et al, 2003) are some of end-effector based robots. Dampace (Stienen et al, 2007), T-WREX (Sanchez et al, 2006), MGA-exoskeleton (Sanchez et al, 2003), L-EXOS (Frisoli et al, 2007) and ARMin I-III Mihelj et al, 2007;Nef et al, 2009) are some of exoskeleton type robots. ARMin I can be stated as semi-exoskeleton robot since it has combined end-effector based structure with exoskleton structure.…”

EMG Analysis on Gyro-Roller Rehabilitation Device for Stroke Patients

“…Robot assisted gait training (RAGT) facilitates gait recovery [4]. Exoskeleton for arm rehabilitation focuses on upper extremity training [9]. These systems received good feedback from the users.…”

Upper-Extremity Rehabilitation Robot RehabRoby: Methodology, Design, Usability and Validation

“…There are two kinds of robot-assisted rehabilitation systems for the upper extremities in terms of mechanical design, which are end-effector-based, and exoskeleton type rehabilitation robots. MIT-MANUS [7], MIME [8], GENTLE/S [9] and NeReBot are end-effectorbased, and ARMin [10], T-WREX [11], Pneu-WREX [12], L-Exos [13] and Salford Rehabilitation Exoskeleton [14] are exoskeleton type robot-assisted rehabilitation systems. Exoskeleton type robots resemble the anatomy of the human arm and each of the robot's joints can be controlled separately, which reduces the complexity of issuing controls.…”

“…The availability of such therapy programs, however, is limited by a number of factors such as the amount of costly therapist's time they involve, and the ability of the therapist to provide controlled, quantifiable, and easily replicable assistance for complex movements. Consequently, robot-assisted rehabilitation that can quantitatively monitor and adapt to a patient's progress, and ensure consistency during rehabilitation may provide a solution to these problems, and has become an active area of research [7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14].…”