A domestic robotic rehabilitation device for assessment of wrist function for outpatients

Abstract

Introduction Available robot-assisted stroke rehabilitation systems are often limited in their utilization in the home environment, due to several barriers such as high cost, absence of therapists, tedious training tasks, or encumbering interfaces. This paper presents a low-cost robotic rehabilitation and assessment device for restoring wrist function, offering wrist exercises incorporating pronation-supination and flexion-extension movements. Furthermore, the device is designed for the assessment of joint stiffness of the wrist, and range of motion in two degrees of freedom. Methods: Mechanical/electrical design of the device as well as the control system is described. A preliminary evaluation focused on the measurement of the torsional stiffness of the limb is presented. It is evaluated by reconstructing the known stiffness values of torsional springs by measuring the motor current required to displace them. Results The device demonstrates the ability to determine the stiffness of an object with low-cost hardware. Use case scenarios of the device for training and assessment of the wrist are presented, allowing for a range of motion of [Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text], for pronation-supination and flexion-extension respectively. Conclusion The device shows potential to help objectively quantify the stiffness of the wrist movement, which consecutively could be used to represent and quantify the degree of impairment of patients after stroke in a more objective manner. Further clinical study is necessary to examine this.

Computer Game-Based Telerehabilitation Platform Targeting Manual Dexterity: Exercise Is Fun. “You Are Kidding—Right?”

“…In addition, visual feedback is used to guide the object manipulations. This type of practice would promote implicit learning of eye-hand coordination [ 26 ].…”

“…Several gaming systems have been used in rehabilitation of the upper extremity. These include, commercial entertainment gaming systems such as the Wii [ 23 ], Kinect [ 24 ], Leap’s motion sensor [ 25 ], and some use robotic manipulandam [ 26 ] or a sensor-equipped glove [ 27 ]. These gaming systems can, in real-time, detect arm segment motions or finger motions.…”

Kineto-Static Analysis and Design Optimization of a 3-DOF Wrist Rehabilitation Parallel Robot with Consideration of the Effect of the Human Limb

“…Hence, when solving the optimization problem, we have to consider these two factors. The parasitic motion of 3-RPS is relatively intuitive and can be obtained by using Equation (8). The analysis mainly focuses on FE and RUD movements, while considering the angular error existing in actual use.…”

“…The structural parameters of the 3-RPS robot are shown in Table 3. It is worth noting that the radius of BP does not affect the value of the parasitic motion of 3-RPS from Equation (8). Although the radius of the BP can affect the size and stability of the robot, here we set the radius of the BP as 0.22 m for the analysis.…”

“…Numerous rehabilitation robots have been proposed in the last four decades for restoring patients' wrist movement ability [4][5][6][7][8]. According to the different structures, these can be divided into two types: serial robots and parallel robots.…”