Mengjie Li

Development of a three freedoms ankle rehabilitation robot for ankle training

In recent years, rehabilitation robot has been a trend to replace traditional therapist rehabilitation on hemiplegic rehabilitation. Researchers have proposed many ankle rehabilitation robots on ankle rehabilitation training. However, most of them are only focusing on single freedom training or providing a passive training to the patient. In this paper, a novel ankle robot with 3 freedoms which combines the active training with passive training together is presented. To build the ankle physiological model, an experiment to detect the ankle physiological data is established. And based on the data, an ankle rehabilitation robot with three degrees is proposed. In order to detect the dynamic movements of the ankle, the robot embeds force sensors and motor encoders. Then, the detail design of the mechanism is introduced. There are pedal parts, thigh fixing parts, base, driving unit and sensing unit in mechanism. Each part of the ankle robot is introduced in detail. Comparing with the other ankle rehabilitation robots, this robot uses three blushless motors to direct three rotation motions directly, and the whole structure is simple and reliable.

Development of a novel ankle rehabilitation robot with three freedoms for ankle rehabilitation training

Ankle rehabilitation training takes an important role in the hemiplegic rehabilitation training. Traditional training requires the physical therapist treating the patient as one to one. The training process is repeating and needs a long period. The performances of training rely heavily on the skill of therapists. The training effectiveness depends on the skills of the therapist. To improve the training effectiveness, there are many ankle rehabilitation robots are proposed. However all of them are only focusing on providing a passive training to the patient. In this paper, an ankle rehabilitation robot with three degrees is proposed. This robot can not only realizes the passive training but also has much more sensors to detect the movements of the ankle, especially realizes the patient active training. In this paper, the detail design of the mechanism is introduced. The mechanical structure includes pedal parts, thigh fixing parts, cross slider parts, driving unit and sensing unit. Comparing with current ankle rehabilitation researches, this robot uses linear motion in horizontal and vertical plane instead of rotary motion to realize dorsiflexion/plantar flexion and abduction/adduction. Finally, we present ankle motion space analysis and ankle robot workspace analysis of ankle robot to verify the feasibility of the robot.

Development of a novel finger and wrist rehabilitation robot for finger and wrist training

Up to now, with the developments of society, aging problems are more serious. With the requirements of rehabilitation, a large of hemiplegia rehabilitation devices are launched out. But most of the hand training robots just limit to the fingers flexible training. They ignored the importance of functional training of hand, and ignore wrist cooperative training in the rehabilitation process. In this paper, a novel finger and wrist rehabilitation robot will be introduced for hemiplegia rehabilitation, a creative hand rehabilitation way is presented. Two rehabilitation units are included -wrist rehabilitation unit and hand rehabilitation unit. Novel torque sensor units with a simple structure are designed to detect torque. The detail of the sensor is introduced in the paper. The proposed finger and wrist rehabilitation robot leads to further research on the rehabilitation robot.