Development of an upper extremity motor function rehabilitation system and an assessment system

Abstract

This paper presents a novel upper extremity motor function rehabilitation system and an assessment system. The rehabilitation system is an active rehabilitation that can be manipulated by patients through a haptic device and an inertia sensor to perform a tracking task in virtual environment with coordination training of bilateral upper extremity. The design of system aims to augment patients' force exerted by their upper extremity and the ability of force control, namely, dexterity. The structure of rehabilitation system is compact and the inertia of the haptic device's stylus is very small (only 45 g), which makes the system suitable for home-rehabilitation. Simultaneously, in order to assess the effect of rehabilitation, an assessment system has been developed using a 6-axis force sensor. The proposed rehabilitation system is testified experimentally for the upper limbs' rehabilitation training.