Abstract
Rehabilitation robots are playing an increasingly important role in daily rehabilitation of patients. In recent years, exoskeleton rehabilitation robots have become a research hotspot. However, the existing exoskeleton rehabilitation robots are mainly rigid exoskeletons. During rehabilitation training using such exoskeletons, the patient’s joint rotation center is fixed, which cannot adapt to the actual joint movements, resulting in secondary damage to the patients. Therefore, in this paper, a tendon-driven flexible upper-limb rehabilitation robot is proposed; the structure and connectors of the rehabilitation robot are designed considering the physiological structure of human upper limbs; we also built the prototype and performed experiments to validate the designed robot. The experimental results show that the proposed upper-limb rehabilitation robot can assist the human subject to conduct upper-limb rehabilitation training.
I. Introduction
Central nervous system diseases, such as stroke, spinal cord injury and traumatic brain injury, tend to cause movement disorder [1]. Clinical studies have shown that intensive rehabilitation training after cerebral injury help patients recover motoric functions because of the brain plasticity [1], [2]. Traditional movement therapy is highly dependent on physiotherapists and the efficacy is limited by professional knowledge and skill levels of physiotherapists [3]. Upper-limbs recover more slowly than lower limbs because of the complex function of neurons. Meanwhile, the rehabilitation therapies are unaffordable for most patients. Robotic rehabilitation opened another way of rehabilitation training and its efficacy has been validated in clinical trials [3], [4]. Many upper-limb robot devices have been developed for rehabilitation or assistance in various forms. One of the famous devices was MIT-MANUS developed by MIT. This kind of devices are stationary external system where the patient inserts their hand or arm and is robotically assisted or resisted in completing predetermined tasks [3], [5]. Other examples of this type of devices include Lum et al.^{\prime}s MIME [6], Kahn et al.’s ARM Guide [7] and a 2-DOF upper-limb rehabilitation robot developed by Tsinghua
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