Development of Robot Assisted Hand Stroke Rehabilitation System

Abstract

A robot assisted hand stroke rehabilitation system is to be developed as this devastating disease have became one of the main reasons of the severe disabilities in the world. This project focuses on assisting the human’s upper limb rehabilitation. The anatomy of the upper limb was first analyzed. Due to simplifications, the upper limb analysis was divided into two parts; the human arm which will consist of seven degrees-of-freedom and the human hand with the thumb modeled as five degrees-of-freedom and the other fingers as four degrees-of-freedom. The first stage of training involves assisting the patients to move their arm, one joint at a time in order to reach the desired end position and orientation. In the second phase of the training, patients are trained to grasp a particular object where the position of the object is fixed. Patients would then have to move according to the joint angles computed in order to reach the target object and to grasp it. This is mainly done for the fingers part. Apart from that, a physical CAD model was built in Solid Works and later translated into MATLAB SimMechanics for simulation purposes. The dynamical analysis was also performed in order to obtain the computed torque and based on that a PID controller was built to compensate the disturbances and imperfections. Finally, the model will be animated with the controller in the MATLAB Virtual Reality Toolbox orbisnap