Development of Legs Rehabilitation Exercise System Driven by Pneumatic Muscle Actuator

The traditional legs rehabilitation exercise system driven by motor makes patients hard to achieve ideal rehabilitation effects. This paper presents a novel legs rehabilitation exercise system driven by pneumatic muscle actuator. The components and control structures of the system were designed according to the requirements of rehabilitation exercise of legs joints. The system consists of pneumatic device and electrical device. The pneumatic device is composed of air supply, control valves and joints drivers which mainly include pneumatic muscle actuators, chain wheel, and bracket. The pneumatic muscle actuators are used for actuating legs joints rotational movement or creating resistance to motion of legs joints. With the control structures, the system completes the continuous passive motion or active resistance motion for the joints of hip, knee and ankle. The experiments verified that the movement of joints in continuous passive motion is smooth, the resistance of joints in active resistance motion is adaptive, yielding and adjustable, and the setting of training parameters is convenient. This provides the beneficial reference in designing new effective legs rehabilitation exercise system.