engleski

Reachability analysis and simulation of a forearm rehabilitation device

In more than half of the stroke survivors aged 65 or more, serious long-term disability is developed. Patients’ arms are often affected, resulting in a partial or complete loss of motor functions. Therapy waitlists, influenced also by the global population ageing, are therefore growing, while the sessions last too short. A possible solution to these challenges is the development of active rehabilitation devices that enable more frequent and intensive rehabilitation sessions. A concept of a compact rehabilitation device for the elbow, the forearm and the wrist, with an additional hand module treated as an end- effector, is proposed in this work. The device has five active and three passive joints. The dimensions of the exoskeleton links are designed by using a fully functional human arm model corresponding to the 50th percentile male ; the installation can, however, be adjusted to a wider range of dimensions via configurable prismatic joints. The device is conceptualized and modelled by using Blender. Its configuration is based on kinematic analyses and compared to the ranges of motions of each forearm joint. The concept and its kinematics are structured as a transformation tree and implemented via the Unified Robot Description Format in the Robotic Operating System. An inverse kinematics problem is formulated next by employing homogenous transformation matrices ; a custom-made closed-form analytical solver is generated to obtain faster and more consistent real-time solutions. To validate the suitability of the device for sensory-motor rehabilitation of the activities of daily living, a reachability analysis is finally performed by using reachability maps implemented in the open-source library OpenRAVE.

forearm rehabilitation ; kinematic analysis ; closed-form solver ; reachability analysis ; ROS implementation

nije evidentirano