Rehabilitation Machine for Bariatric Individuals

Abstract

Obesity is known to be growing worldwide. The World Health Organization (WHO) reports that obesity has tripled since 1975. In 2016, 39% of adults over 18 years old were overweight, and 13% were obese. Obesity is mostly preventable by adopting lifestyle improvements, enhancing diet quality, and doing physical exercise. The workload of the physical exercises should be proportionate to the patient’s capabilities. However, it must be considered that obese people are not used to training; they may not endure physical exertion and, even more critically, they could have some psychological impediments to the workouts. Physical exercises and equipment must, therefore, guarantee comfort and prevent situations in which the bariatric individual may feel inadequate. For these reasons, this study aims to design an innovative system to approach simple physical activities, like leg and arm exercises, to bariatric users to enable them to recover mobility and muscle tone gradually. The leading feature of this architecture is the design of hidden exercise mechanisms to overcome the psychological barriers of the users toward these kinds of machines. This paper proposes the initial design of the main sub-systems composing the rehabilitation machine, namely the leg curl and leg extension mechanism and its control architecture, the upper body exercises system, and a series of regulation mechanisms required to accommodate a wide range of users. The proposed functional design will then lead to the development of a prototype to validate the machine.