Patient-cooperative control strategies for coordinated functional arm movements

Abstract

An increasingly large number of people in industrialized countries suffers from a stroke every year. The rehabilitation robot ARMin has been developed for the arm rehabilitation of stroke patients and other neurological patients. In this work, a control strategy for training Activities of Daily Living (ADL) with ARMin is presented. The training of ADLs motivates the subject and facilitates relearning of functional movements. A combination of impedance and admittance control is implemented and a control strategy to support the subject in a patient-cooperative way during the training is introduced. The control strategy is based on the minimum intervention principle thus maximizing the subject's own contribution to the task. First results with healthy subjects are presented. The algorithms are described as a general concept and can also be applied to other rehabilitation robots.