CONCEPTUAL DESIGN FOR ROBOT-AIDED ANKLE REHABILITATION DEVICE

Abstract

Ankle injury is one of physical injury that can happen whether in sports or in domestic accidents. The injury can take from weeks to months to recover and requires physiotherapy treatment for effective recovery. Currently, there are established treatments for ankle rehabilitation in hospital such as endurance training and range-of-motion training. However, the success of rehabilitation for ankle injury directly depends on physiotherapy administered by experts. This conventional therapy treatment requires patients to frequently visit to hospital which is tedious and costly. To solve this, researchers have introduced a number of robot-aided ankle rehabilitation devices which has been developed in the last decade. However, those devices are bulky and do not designed for portability and configurability – which is an important feature for patients undergoing rehabilitation at home. In this paper, we proposed a concept based on robot-aided ankle rehabilitation device to assist patients undergo rehabilitation procedures. We focused on all patients’ need especially based on important features such as portability and configurability of the device. Standard design process were followed including concept generation and concept selection according to all relevant criteria using Morphological Charts and Pugh Method. A Pulley Driven Cable Based Parallel Mechanism robot-aided ankle rehabilitation device has been selected based on selections from 5 different concept design generated. We show that a design based on parallel mechanisms should provide the needed portability and configurability. This result provides an insight for a portable and configurable robot-aided ankle rehabilitation device.