Home rehabilitation assist robot to facilitate isolated movements for hemiplegia patients

Abstract

Some stroke patients are affected by hemiplegia, which is the complete paralysis of half of the body, and need to train in upper limb motions with high frequency to improve their quality of life. Therefore, the authors developed a portable robot with a main processor, actuators, motor drivers, a force sensor, and a touch display to assist such high-frequency training at home. To recover the motor function of the upper limbs by voluntary movement, this robot instructs the joint motion based on the force input. Therefore, this study proposes a force control algorithm for the omni-wheel mechanism and a method that estimates the odometry of the omni-wheel mechanism based on the circuit equation of the DC motor without rotary encoders. Moreover, a method that estimates integrated electromyograph patterns based on the force and movement of the robot using a multiple linear regression model is proposed for the evaluation of co-operative movement. The effectiveness of these proposed methods were confirmed by evaluation experiments.