Development of a conceptual model for wrist/forearm rehabilitation robot with two degrees of freedom

Abstract

People who lose their upper limb functions (i.e., movement of their hand and arm) after a stroke or an injury need to follow rehabilitation practices which are defined by a physiotherapist. These exercises are repetitive in nature and robotic systems are well suited for such applications. Hence, there are many rehabilitation robots developed so far and some of them are already in commercial use. In this study, a pneumatically actuated, lightweight, singular free, two degrees of freedom wrist rehabilitation robot is proposed. The developed conceptual models are evaluated for the defined arm/ wrist rehabilitation purposes by comparing them with other available upper limb rehabilitation robots. The proposed robots have serial mechanisms. The main difference between the selected robot designs with other solutions is that actuators do not affect force/ torque requirements of other actuators such as in electrically actuated systems. It also uses a simpler control technique.