Mechatronic integral ankle rehabilitation system: Ankle rehabilitation robot, serious game, and facial expression recognition system

Abstract

People who have suffered an injury require a rehabilitation process of the affected muscle. Rehabilitation machines have been proposed to recover and strengthen the affected muscle. In this chapter, we propose a novel ankle rehabilitation parallel robot of two degrees of freedom consisting of two linear guides. For the integral rehabilitation, a serious game and a facial expression recognition system are added for entertainment and to improve patient engagement in the rehabilitation process. The serious game has a simple design. This game has three levels and it is controlled with an impedance control, which specific command allowing character game jumps the obstacles. Facial expressions recognition system assists to the serious game. We propose to recognize three different facial expressions to the basic expressions. Based on the experiment results, we concluded that our system is good because it has a performance of 0.95%.