Abstract
Neuromuscular and sensorimotor degeneration caused by stroke or any other disease significantly reduce the physical, cognitive, and social well-being across the life span. Mostly, therapeutic interventions are employed in order to restore the lost degrees-of-freedom (DOF) caused by such impairments and automating these therapeutic tasks through exoskeletons/robots is becoming a common practice. However, aligning these robotic devices with the complex anatomical and geometrical motions of the joints is very challenging. At the same time, a good alignment is required in order to establish a better synergy of human-exoskeleton system for an effective intervention procedure. In this paper, a case study of an exoskeleton and shoulder joint alignment were studied through different size and orientation impairment models through motion capture data and musculoskeletal modeling in OpenSim. A preliminary result indicates that shoulder elevation is very sensitive to misalignment and varies with shoulder joint axes orientation; this is partly due to drastic displacement of the upper arm axes with respect to the shoulder joint origin during elevation. Additional study and analysis is required to learn any possible restraint on shoulder elevation that could potentially help in the exoskeleton development.
Highlights
The shoulder is one of the most important and complex human joints due to its wide range of motion
According to anatomy of the shoulder, the origin of posterior fiber in deltoid muscle is at spine of the scapula; and, infraspinatus and teres minor are rotator cuff muscles in charge of arm rotation
The shoulder’s complex anatomy and geometrical motion pose a great challenge for designing assistive technologies, such as exoskeletons
Summary
The shoulder is one of the most important and complex human joints due to its wide range of motion. It plays a vital role in the activities-of-daily living in placing and orienting the arm. A limitation in the range of motion (ROM) of the shoulder can reduce the quality of life [1,2,3]. Manually assisted or conventional therapy lacks training intensity. One approach to overcome these limitations is with the use of exoskeletons. These mechanisms can perform more intensive training sessions, measure forces being applied and trajectories being followed, and muscles activities being
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