Abstract
A large amount of hemiplegic survivors are suffering from motor impairment. Ankle rehabilitation exercises act an important role in recovering patients' walking ability after stroke. Currently, patients mainly perform ankle exercise to reobtain range of motion (ROM) and strength of the ankle joint under a therapist's assistance by manual operation. However, therapists suffer from high work intensity, and most of the existed rehabilitation devices focus on ankle functional training and ignore the importance of neurological rehabilitation in the early hemiplegic stage. In this paper, a new robotic ankle rehabilitation platform (RARP) is proposed to assist patients in executing ankle exercise. The robotic platform consists of two three-DOF symmetric layer-stacking mechanisms, which can execute ankle internal/external rotation, dorsiflexion/plantarflexion, and inversion/eversion exercise while the rotation center of the distal zone of the robotic platform always coincides with patients' ankle pivot center. Three exercise modes including constant-speed exercise, constant torque-impedance exercise, and awareness exercise are developed to execute ankle training corresponding to different rehabilitation stages. Experiments corresponding to these three ankle exercise modes are performed, the result demonstrated that the RARP is capable of executing ankle rehabilitation, and the novel awareness exercise mode motivates patients to proactively participate in ankle training.
Highlights
A large number of stroke survivors are suffering from motor impairment
This paper presented a novel layer-stacking structure robotic platform used for robot-aided ankle rehabilitations
The ankle rehabilitation robot consists of two symmetric 3-DOF robotic platforms, where one is used to detect the movement of the sound side ankle and the other is used to exercise the affected side ankle
Summary
A large number of stroke survivors are suffering from motor impairment. The recovery of motor loss function is difficult conducted only by biomedical treatment [1]. Ankle rehabilitation after stroke consists of three stages [2]. Known as the first month after stroke, patients mainly play simple and passive training in bed. Patients begin to participate in active rehabilitation exercises, including balance and coordination training to strengthen the affected ankle. Patients try to reobtain their healthy state through intensive rehabilitation training. Rehabilitation at the first two stages plays an important role in recovering their walk ability by exercising the affected muscles [3, 4]
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