Design of respiratory training robot in rehabilitation of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease

Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is a type of obstructive lung disease which affects 329 million people or nearly 5% of the population in the worldwide. The respiratory training robot proposed in this paper, which is designed for using in a bed, aims to assist in COPD patients´ respiratory activities and achieve rehabilitation goals on respiration through chest and respiratory muscle training. The training exercise includes assisting COPD patients in chest up and down motion and move the arms forward and backward rhythmically, which reduces the respiratory loads of patients and helps patients breathe properly. The verification experiments were carried out utilizing wireless surface EMG measuring system to compare the respiratory muscle activities of subjects who were under static state and training state, respectively. The experimental results have shown that the activity of the diaphragm muscle decreases in training state comparing with that in the static state, which indicates that training robot can relieve the load of diaphragm muscle and indirectly alter the breathing strategy of COPD patients.