A Brief Review on Robotic Exoskeletons for Upper Extremity Rehabilitation to Find the Gap between Research Porotype and Commercial Type

Abstract

The number of disabled individuals due to stroke is increasing day by day and is projected to continue increasing at an alarming rate in United States. But the current amount of health professionals in physical therapy is inadequate to provide rehabilitation to these large groups. From early 1990s, researchers have been trying to develop an easy and feasible solution to this problem and lot of assistive devices both end effector type or exoskeleton type have been developed till to date. However, only a few of them have been commercialized and are being used in rehabilitation of post-stroke patients. Making the use of exoskeletons and other devices to regain lost motor function is rare. Providing therapy to this large group is quite impossible without commercializing of exoskeleton. This has motivated the authors to make a literature review and figure the reasons out that need to be solved to bridge the gap between research prototype to commercial version. This paper covers the necessity of incorporating robotic devices in rehabilitation, a brief description of existing devices particularly upper limb exoskeletons, their hardware limitations, and control issues. Our review shows that there are significant flaws in hardware design and developing control algorithm of exoskeletons to be available in rehabilitation program.