Development of CR2-Haptic: A compact and portable rehabilitation robot for wrist and forearm training

Abstract

Stroke has now become the leading cause of severe disability. Rehabilitation robots are gradually becoming popular for stroke rehabilitation to improve motor recovery, as robotic technology can assist, enhance, and further quantify rehabilitation training for stroke patients. However, most of the available rehabilitation robots are complex and involve multiple degrees-of-freedom (DOFs) causing it to be very expensive and huge in size. Rehabilitation robots should be useful but also need to be affordable and portable enabling more patients to afford and train independently at home. This paper presents a development of an affordable, portable and compact rehabilitation robot that implements different rehabilitation strategies for stroke patient to train forearm and wrist movement in an enhanced virtual reality environment with haptic feedback.

Interactive Compliance Control of a Wrist Rehabilitation Device (WReD) with Enhanced Training Safety

“…This paper presents the development of the WR e D and a compliance control method for comfortable and safe human-robot interaction. By contrast with existing wrist rehabilitation robots [15, 18, 22], the WR e D is portable for use in hospital or home environment due to its reconfigurable structure design. In this study, the WR e D is configured for the rehabilitation training of wrist flexion and extension, as shown in Figure 1, since wrist flexion and extension are worth 70% of total wrist function [35], and training therapy along this direction is more commonly used than that of radial and ulnar deviation.…”

“…This device is actuated by a direct current motor with the integration of a torque transducer and a potentiometer in providing feedback signals, which allows the implementation of advanced interactive training strategies. Khor et al [22] developed a single-DOF device that can enable wrist and forearm training in different configurations. This device has not been controlled with advanced interaction modes, while it has advantages of cost effectiveness and portability.…”

Development of a Reconfigurable Wrist Rehabilitation Device with an Adaptive Forearm Holder

“…an Adaptive Forearm Holder* only one DOF [24]. However, it only permits a specific wrist motion at a time and can be manually reconfigured to different wrist motions if needed.…”

A Plug-and-Train Robot (PLUTO) for Hand Rehabilitation: Design and Preliminary Evaluation

“…hand grasp while performing forearm pronation/supination), this may not be a major issue for two reasons: (a) multi-DOF movement are unlikely to be the primary focus for moderate and severely affected patients requiring assisted therapy using a robot, and (b) there is currently no evidence favoring multi-DOF training over single DOF training; there is, however, some evidence showing that training individual DOFs is as effective as training multiple DOFs simultaneously [21]. Khor et al recently presented a hand rehabilitation robot with a similar design approach as PLUTO -CR2-Haptic [22], which uses a single actuator and changeable handles to train wrist/forearm functions. The proposed design for PLUTO overcomes the short-comings of the CR2-Haptic: (a) CR2-Haptic's table-mounted actuator needs to be rotated for training different functions (e.g.…”