Design of Single-DOF Immersive Upper Limb Rehabilitation System via Kinematic Mapping and Virtual Reality

Abstract

Mechanical devices such as robots are widely adopted for limb rehabilitation. Due to the variety of human body parameters, the rehabilitation motion for different patients usually has its individual pattern, thus we adopt clustering-based machine learning technique to find a limited number of motion patterns for upper-limb rehabilitation, so that they could represent the large amount of those from people who have various body parameters. Using the regression motion of the clustering result as the task motion, in this paper we seek to apply kinematic-mapping-based motion synthesis framework to design a one-DOF mechanism such that it could lead the patients’ upper limb through the task motion. Also,considering rehab training generally involves a large amount of repetition in daily basis, this paper has developed an immersive rehab system with Unity3D based on Virtual Reality (VR). A patient user interface as well as an administrator user interface are presented, and a two-mode rehabilitation strategy is proposed. The construction of the integrated system and a prototype of the upper limb rehab device are also shown in the end of this paper.