Haptics-enabled rehabilitation: A design project for a Control Systems course

Abstract

This paper presents an interesting design project for the Control Systems course offered to Electrical and Computer Engineering and Mechanical Engineering senior students. Students designed real-time control systems that involve haptic effects, meaning force feedback applied to the user by a motorized device as part of the human-computer interface. The main goal of this project is to design haptics-enabled rehabilitation exercises to help post-stroke patients regain their fine-motor skills. The different approaches taken by the multidisciplinary teams are presented, and feedback from students are analyzed. This project familiarized students with the Matlab/Simulink based software platform for the implementation of hardware-in-the-loop systems, and improved their understanding of the social impact of engineering solutions. © 2011 American Society for Engineering Education.