In the development of robot-assisted rehabilitation systems for upper limb rehabilitation therapy, human electromyogram (EMG) is widely used due to its ability to detect the user intended motion. EMG is one kind of biological signal that can be recorded to evaluate the performance of skeletal muscles by means of a sensor electrode. Based on recorded EMG signals, user intended motion could be extracted via estimation of joint torque, force or angle. Therefore, this estimation becomes one of the most important factors to achieve accurate user intended motion. In this paper, an upper limb joint angle estimation methodology is proposed. A back propagation neural network (BPNN) is developed to estimate the shoulder and elbow joint angles from the recorded EMG signals. A Virtual Human Model (VHM) is also developed and integrated with BPNN to perform the simulation of the estimated angle. The relationships between sEMG signals and upper limb movements are observed in this paper. The effectiveness of our developments is evaluated with four healthy subjects and a VHM simulation. The results show that the methodology can be used in the estimation of joint angles based on EMG.

This paper presents the development of rehabilitation with biofeedback (RehaBio) system for upper-limb rehabilitation that can be used to restore the upper-limb lost functions of patients who suffer from traumatic brain injury (TBI), spinal cord injury (SCI) or cerebrovascular accident (CVA), which generally result in paralysis on one side of the body. The system aims to close the gap in the requirements of one-to-one attention between physiotherapist and patient, to replace boring traditional upper-limb rehabilitation exercises and to reduce high healthcare cost. RehaBio is made up of three major modules: database module, rehabilitation exercise module and biofeedback simulation module. Database module provides the information of the patients and their rehabilitation progress while rehabilitation exercise module provides with effective and motivated exercises based on augmented reality approach. Biofeedback simulation module in RehaBio serves two purposes: from physiotherapist point of view, it provides the tracking of biofeedback information of patient's muscle performance and activities. From the patient's point of view, it serves as a visual reflection of current activated muscles that create as an additional motivation during training process. The effectiveness of the RehaBio system was evaluated by performing the experiments and provided with promising results.Keywords: rehabilitation; augmented reality; biofeedback; mechatronics.Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Aung, Y.M. and Al-Jumaily, A. (2014) 'Augmented reality-based RehaBio system for shoulder rehabilitation', Int.

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