Development and Control of a ‘Soft-Actuated’ Exoskeleton for Use in Physiotherapy and Training
By N. Tsagarakis, Darwin G. Caldwell. Auton. Robots, 2003
374 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Full or partial loss of function in the upper limb is an increasingly common due to sports injuries, occupational injuries, spinal cord injuries, and strokes. Typically treatment for these conditions relies on manipulative physiotherapy procedures which are extremely labour intensive. Although mechanical assistive device exist for limbs this is rare for the upper body.In this paper we describe the construction and testing of a seven degree of motion prototype upper arm training/rehabilitation (exoskeleton) system. The total weight of the uncompensated orthosis is less than 2 kg. This low mass is primarily due to the use of a new range of pneumatic Muscle Actuators (pMA) as power source for the system. This type of actuator, which has also an excellent power/weight ratio, meets the need for safety, simplicity and lightness. The work presented shows how the system takes advantage of the inherent controllable compliance to produce a unit that is extremely powerful, providing a wide range of functionality (motion and forces over an extended range) in a manner that has high safety integrity for the patient. A training control scheme is introduced which is used to control the orthosis when used as exercise facility. Results demonstrate the potential of the device as an upper limb training, rehabilitation and power assist (exoskeleton) system.
Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Rehabilitation
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f3e38fa44cf8ae9462846132578862df817446e8
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In Biomedical Engineering
In Rehabilitation
Citations in the corpus
- A Series Elastic- and Bowden-Cable-Based Actuation System for Use as Torque Actuator in Exoskeleton-Type Robots (2006, background): “…" telepresence " for dealing with hazardous material or difficult circumstances from a safe distance (Schiele and Visentin 2003). c. training human motor skills, for example in the rehabilitation of arm functionality (Tsagarakis and Caldwell 2003) or gait (Colombo et al. 2002) after a stroke.”
- An EMG-Based Control for an Upper-Limb Power-Assist Exoskeleton Robot (2012, background): “For rehabilitation, predefined or designated motion or force is basically generated with impedance controller for the user [15], [25].”
- A Seven-degrees-of-freedom Robot-arm Driven by Pneumatic Artificial Muscles for Humanoid Robots (2005, background): “Making these two joints independent is also a major difficulty, as already emphasized by Tsagarakis and Caldwell (2003) whose McKibben muscle exoskeleton shows a shoulder flexion–extension and abduction–adduction dependence.”