Abstract
Wrist rehabilitation is needed to help post-stroke and post-surgery patients recover from wrist fracture or injury. Traditional rehabilitation training is conducted by a therapist in a hospital, which hinders timely treatment due to the corresponding time and space constraints. This paper presents the design and implementation of a soft parallel robot for automated wrist rehabilitation. The presented wrist rehabilitation robot integrates the advantages of both soft robot and parallel robot structures. Unlike traditional rigid-body based rehabilitation robots, this soft parallel robot exhibits a compact structure, which is highly secure, adaptable, and flexible and thus a low-cost solution for personalized treatment. The proposed soft wrist-rehabilitation robot is driven by six evenly distributed linear actuators using pneumatic artificial muscles and one central linear electric motor. The introduced parallel-kinematic mechanism design enables the enhancement of the output stiffness of the soft robot for practical use. An electromyography sensor is adopted to provide feedback signals for evaluating the rehabilitation training process. A kinematic model of the designed robot is derived, and a prototype is fabricated for experimental testing. The results demonstrate that the developed soft rehabilitation robot can assist the wrist to realize all the required training motions, including abduction-adduction, flexion-extension, and supination-pronation. The compact and lightweight structure of this novel robot makes it convenient to use, and suitable rehabilitation training modes can be chosen for tailored rehabilitation at home or in a hospital.
Highlights
Wrist rehabilitation is needed to help post-stroke and post-surgery patients recover from wrist fracture or injury
A new soft parallel robot is designed in this work by integrating the concepts of soft robots and parallel robots
Unlike the serial-kinematic robot with multiple links and joints connected in series, the end-effector of a parallel robot is connected to the base by multiple limbs in parallel, providing a larger output s tiffness[22,23]
Summary
Wrist rehabilitation is needed to help post-stroke and post-surgery patients recover from wrist fracture or injury. Unlike traditional rigid-body based rehabilitation robots, this soft parallel robot exhibits a compact structure, which is highly secure, adaptable, and flexible and a low-cost solution for personalized treatment. This robot structure has a large footprint size, high cost, and complicated operation This robot is suitable for use only in hospitals; it is not appropriate for patients to perform rehabilitation training independently with this robot. It achieves three-degrees-of-freedom (3-DOF) motion of the wrist, including extension, pronation, and flexion[9] Such a rehabilitation robot must be worn by the patient, and it has a rigid structure, which exhibits a certain degree of risk. To overcome the shortcomings of previous designs, including complex structures, safety risks, complicated operations, and limited-DOF motions, a new wrist rehabilitation robot for practical use is needed. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first of its kind presented in the literature
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