RehaBot: Design and Development of Upper-limb Exoskeleton Robot for Stroke Recovery

Robot assisted rehabilitation are getting popular due to their ability to provide therapies with repetitive  movements resulting higher accurately and minimal intervention of a trained therapist. Further, reproduction of such a robot is much faster and consistent than producing a number of trained therapists. Design and development of rehabilitation robots are extensively studied in the recent past and RehaBot is one such exoskeleton device developed by us. 

It features a robot arm with 2-DoF (degrees of freedom) with the capability of reproducing movements recorded by a therapist using a specific application software developed for the robot and live movements carried out by a therapist using a simple wearable device. That is, passive  and passive-mirrored modes of operation, respectively. These two modes can best assist the patients with their movements without receiving any assistance from the them and are best suited for patients with full disability. 

Features:

1. 2-DoF (movements of shoulder joint and the elbow joint)
2. Passive mode and passive-mirrored modes of operation
3. Specialised application software for the operation
4. Separate profile for each user to record their exercises
5. Voice assisted navigation through for the software

Future works:

Patients with partial disability or those recovering from permanent disability may have a limited ability to move their limbs. The robot should assist the patients movements by identifying the movement direction and the required level of assistance which is called the Assistive mode of operation of the robot. Such research works are typically carried out using surface electromyographic (sEMG) signals and machine learning algorithms. As the next step, we will be implementing the assistive mode of operation for RehaBot.

Project Contacts: Dr. Subodha Gunawardena (subodha@eie.ruh.ac.lk)