Active control with force sensor and shoulder circumduction implemented on exoskeleton robot NTUH-II

Abstract

Many neurological or orthopedic disorders may cause motor impairments of shoulder. Patients require intensive training in order to recover from those impairments. However, the intensive training will lead to growing demand for strenuous work. Robot-aided therapy is able to alleviate the therapist's laborious burden and to provide more information about patient's condition during the therapy. Generally, the requirement of active therapy arises during the later stage of recovery. To realize the active therapy, a useful active control of the robot and effective recovery assessment for the active robot-aided therapy are essential. In this paper, a new active control method and an active therapy protocol with assessment indexes are designed. In this pilot research, several experiments on healthy subjects are designed to verify the proposed method with its active control performance and the effectiveness of the assessment indexes.