engleski

Issues in the mechatronics design of a full arm rehabilitation device

Traditional therapy for the recovery of patients with arm impairments involves physical therapists that control the (mainly repetitive) rehabilitative movements of the patients and help them recover the (hopefully full) motion ability of the arm. The limited number of physiotherapists, as well as their limited time availability to be spent with each patient, constitute in this frame an increasing problem. The goal of this study is to ideate, develop and design a full arm rehabilitation mechatronics device that will enable a fast and reliable recovery of patients’ motion ability. Moreover, the device should provide the patients with the possibility to use it rather autonomously so that each physiotherapist could ideally be concurrently in charge of at least three patients. In this frame, preliminary results of the critical evaluation of the solutions available on the market are presented in this work. Especially relevant is here the consideration of the needed number and arrangement (distribution) of the degrees of freedom (DOFs) and their benefit-to-price ratio. A crucial part of this evaluation is the study of the kinematics of the movement of the whole arm in the natural (unconstrained) state. Considerations about the usable actuators and sensors complement the performed evaluation. In fact, the actuators should provide the needed help to the patients while performing the motions otherwise not achievable by their own, while the sensors should hence provide the needed feedback to the used control system so as the optimize the level of help when the degree of autonomy that the patients can accomplish by themselves is reached. The computing part controlling the performances of the device, complemented ideally with a virtual reality (VR) users’ interface, follows thus patients’ improvements and stimulates them to make full use of their efforts while assuring the safe usage of the whole device.

mechatronics approach ; arm rehabilitation ; kinematics of motion ; DOFs ; sensors and actuators ; virtual reality

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