Design and control of a diagnosis and treatment aimed robotic platform for wrist and forearm rehabilitation: DIAGNOBOT

Abstract

Therapeutic exercises play an important role in physical therapy and rehabilitation. The use of robots has been increasing day by day in the practice of therapeutic exercises. This study aims to design and control a novel robotic platform named DIAGNOBOT for diagnosis and treatment (therapeutic exercise). It has three 1-degree-of-freedom robotic manipulators and a single grasping force measurement unit. It is able to perform flexion-extension and ulnar-radial deviation movements for the wrist and pronation-supination movement for the forearm. The platform has a modular and compact structure and is capable of treating two patients concurrently. In order to control the DIAGNOBOT, an impedance control-based controller was developed for force control, which was required for the exercises, as well as a proportional-integral-derivative controller for position control. To model the resistive exercise, an angle-dependent impedance control method different from traditional methods has been proposed. Experiments were made on five healthy subjects and it has been demonstrated that the proposed robotic platform and its controller can perform therapeutic exercises.

Development of an intelligent controller for robot-aided assessment and treatment guidance in physical medicine and rehabilitation

“…The ability of the developed robotic system to perform therapeutic exercises is given in reference [24] along with the test studies with healthy subjects. In this study, the assessment and treatment suggestion performance of the controller was demonstrated through test studies conducted with 8 voluntary patients.…”

“…The assessment performance of the intelligent controller has been demonstrated through experiments which were performed with patients. The details on the design and conventional control structure of the system are given in previous studies [24,25].…”

“…In the isotonic exercise, the limb is moved along the ROM against a constant force. In the vario-resistive exercise[24], various difficulty levels are applied to the patient depending on the ROM.The general block diagram of the system is given inFigure 1. There are three robot manipulators on the DIAGNOBOT to perform flexion-extension (fle-ext), ulnar-radial (uln-rad) deviation and pronation-supination (pro-sup) movements in wrist and forearm.…”

Design and analysis of a novel long-distance double tendon-sheath transmission device for breast intervention robots under MRI field

“…The tendon-sheath concept has been widely used in medical and other types of robots [10][11][12][13] because of its high transmission precision, light weight, smooth transmission, flexibility, and small size. Kaneko et al 14,15 studied the transmission characteristics of a simple tendon-sheath model for finger joint control.…”

Dynamic Modeling and Interactive Performance of PARM: A Parallel Upper-Limb Rehabilitation Robot Using Impedance Control for Patients after Stroke

“…For patients after stroke, the task-repetitive training has been demonstrated to be effective in improving their upper and lower extremity functions and ADL [ 3 ]. To meet the requirement for repetitive training, various upper-limb rehabilitation robots have been developed over the past twenty years, which are generally classified into two categories [ 4 ]: end-effector robots, such as DIAGNOBOT [ 5 ], CARR [ 6 ], MIT-MANUS [ 7 ], MIME [ 8 ], GENTLE/s [ 9 ], and exoskeleton robots, such as CADEN-7 [ 10 ], RUPERT [ 11 ], BONES [ 12 ], and ARMin [ 13 ]. Since the robotic rehabilitation exhibits the advantages in terms of high-dosage, high-intensity, and task-specific training [ 14 ], randomized controlled trials comparing the robot-assisted and conventional therapy have yielded significant effects of robots on the improvements of limb function [ 15 , 16 ] and even ADL [ 17 ].…”