Design of arm exercises for rehabilitation assistance

Abstract

This paper presents the design and testing of arm exercises for rehabilitation assistance. The description of the human arm is presented together with the arm motion impairments. The motion planning for four arm exercises and the experimental procedure for data collection are described. A procedure to generate reference trajectories by regression analysis is explained. The procedure is numerically validated to prove the successful generation of a representative trajectory for a set of trajectory samples. Reference trajectories are generated using the proposed procedure for four arm exercises through trajectory samples acquired from 12 subjects. The obtained reference trajectories can be used for rehabilitation assisting the traditional therapies using an automatized device.