Bimanual tele rehabilitation robot

Abstract

Post-stroke patients lose their interlimb coordination and ability to do bimanual activities. This is common for arms, and usually, patients get one arm paretic. This is a heavy burden since everyday activities need both hands to do. For recovery, they need intensive bimanual therapy. The robotic approach is more effective than traditional rehabilitation for this kind of therapy. A bimanual master-slave robotic system can be used to do simultaneous exercises for patients’ both hands. Our focus is to implement the two most basic and critical movements into this robot. One is Flexion and Extension, and the other is Internal and external rotation. Stroke is one of the conditions that causes long-term disabilities. This causes a lot of struggles for patients to recover. To overcome that and speed up the recovery we propose a robotic approach, with reduced dependency on a therapist and increased repeatability and robustness. When doing these exercises, the patient’s shoulder must be in a relaxed position. Otherwise, the generated torques will depend on the shoulder position. Hence there must be adjustments for varying arm lengths as it changes the position of the elbow joint. Also, we are going to implement two exercises which are done in perpendicular planes into one 1 DOF (Degrees of Freedom), robot. And we need to provide methods to change the motor orientation for that.