Use of unobtrusive human-machine interface for rehabilitation of stroke victims through robot assisted mirror therapy

Abstract

Stroke is one of the leading causes of long-term disability worldwide. Present techniques employed for rehabilitation of victims suffering from partial paralysis or loss of function, such as mirror therapy, require substantial amount of resources, which may not be readily available. In traditional mirror therapy, patients place a mirror beside the functional limb, blocking their view of the affected limb, creating the illusion that both the limbs are working properly, which enhances recovery by enlisting direct simulation. This paper proposes an alternate robot based concept, named Wear-A-BAN, where the rehabilitative task will be carried out by a normal articulated industrial robot. During the proposed rehabilitative procedure, the patients are made to wear a smart sleeve on the functional limb. Movement of this limb is monitored in real-time, by wireless Body-Area Network (BAN) sensors placed inside the sleeve, and copied over the sagittal plane to the affected limb.This procedure results in considerable savings in terms of money and personnel, as even though this procedure does not make the rehabilitation process autonomous, but one therapist can monitor various patients at a time. The industrial robot used is suitable for this purpose due to safety aspects naturally existing in the robot, is relatively cheap in price, and allows comprehensive 3-D motions of the limb. Also, unlike traditional therapy, this procedure allows actual movement of the affected limb. The sensors can also be used for other applications, such as gaming and daily life personal activity monitoring.

Hand Rehabilitation Robotics on Poststroke Motor Recovery

“…For example, the MIT-Manus robot uses the massed training approach by practicing reaching movements to train the upper limbs [ 15 ]; the Mirror Image Movement Enabler (MIME) uses the bilateral training approach to train the paretic limb while reducing abnormal synergies [ 16 ]. Robot-assisted therapy has been greatly developed over the past three decades with the advances in robotic technology such as the exoskeleton and bioengineering, which has become a significant supplement to traditional physical therapy [ 17 , 18 ]. For example, compared with the therapist exhausted in training patients with manual labor, the hand exoskeleton designed by Wege et al can move the fingers of patients dexterously and repeatedly [ 19 , 20 ].…”

Design of Master-slave velocity tracking Upper-limb Exoskeleton system and Feed-forward compensation control

“…The driving angular velocities of J1 and J2 can be obtained by equation (11). However, the angular velocity ̇3 of joint J3 should not be calculated by equation (11) because the rotation angle 3 of the exoskeleton joint J3 represents the rotation angle of the upper arm around the direction of the impaired limb, since the healthy human upper limb wearing the gyr1 is a flexible body and the exoskeleton manipulator is a rigid body, the reading of ̇3 measured by the gyr1 cannot indicate the joint J3 rotation angular velocity. The angular velocities ̇1 and ̇2 can be expressed as: During the mirror-driven movement process, the movement of the forearm in the workspace can be divided into two parts: translational motion along with the upper arm (fixed elbow joint) and rotation relative to the upper arm.…”

“…Lum et al [10] designed a mirror-image rehabilitation training device driven by surface electromyography(sEMG) signals which can be generated in the process of upper limb movement. Gautam et al [11] proposed a mirror image human-computer interface system named Wear-A-BAN. The motion state of the upper limb is monitored in real time through the wireless body area network (WBAN) sensor installed on the healthy limb of the patient.…”