Development of a novel ankle rehabilitation robot with three freedoms for ankle rehabilitation training

Abstract

Ankle rehabilitation training takes an important role in the hemiplegic rehabilitation training. Traditional training requires the physical therapist treating the patient as one to one. The training process is repeating and needs a long period. The performances of training rely heavily on the skill of therapists. The training effectiveness depends on the skills of the therapist. To improve the training effectiveness, there are many ankle rehabilitation robots are proposed. However all of them are only focusing on providing a passive training to the patient. In this paper, an ankle rehabilitation robot with three degrees is proposed. This robot can not only realizes the passive training but also has much more sensors to detect the movements of the ankle, especially realizes the patient active training. In this paper, the detail design of the mechanism is introduced. The mechanical structure includes pedal parts, thigh fixing parts, cross slider parts, driving unit and sensing unit. Comparing with current ankle rehabilitation researches, this robot uses linear motion in horizontal and vertical plane instead of rotary motion to realize dorsiflexion/plantar flexion and abduction/adduction. Finally, we present ankle motion space analysis and ankle robot workspace analysis of ankle robot to verify the feasibility of the robot.