Development of a robot MKW-II for hand and wrist rehabilitation training

Abstract

With the aggravation of ageing society, the number of hemiplegic patients has increased rapidly. As a result, the requirement of rehabilitation training has made a huge increase. In order to help hemiplegic patients to get a better rehabilitation and help occupational therapists to reduce working pressure, series of rehabilitation training robot has been developed. Although the rehabilitation robot has been improved greatly for meeting various requirements, most of rehabilitation robots still just focus on rehabilitation training of single joint and neglect the recovery of damaged nervous system. In order to offer patients comprehensive rehabilitation training and help recovering nervous system, a new MKW series rehabilitation robots are designed to realize wrist and hand independent and cooperative training in our team. As the MKW-I is not convenient for use and its sensors' accuracy would be heavily influenced by environment. Therefore, MKW-II is designed for better rehabilitation effectiveness. For these reasons, we propose the MKW-II, which can perfectly solve these problems. The improvement of mechanism structure and improvement of related sensors will be introduced detailly in this paper.