Study of a wire-driven leg rehabilitation system

In this paper, we describe human subject experiments of a multiple-degree-of-freedom (DOF) leg rehabilitation system that we have proposed. The characteristic of the proposed system is employment of a parallel wire mechanism. The rehabilitation devices using a parallel wire mechanism are expected to have the advantages such as system safety and human-friendliness. We have built and are testing a 4-DOF experimental system. The target motions of the experimental system are hip joint flexion/extension, hip joint abduction/adduction, hip joint external/internal rotation, and knee joint flexion/extension. The experimental results showed that the experimental system can carry out 4-DOF motions with different patient postures. Also the results of subjective evaluation showed that the proposed system makes the subjects feel less constrained.