Development of wearable master-slave training device constructed with pneumatic rubber muscles

A target of this study is to rehabilitate an elbow flexing contracture patient caused by a brain infarction and so on. In rehabilitation for the patient, a trainer flexes the patient´s elbow by a hand until the patient feels a little pain, and then the trainer keeps the applied force for a while. In this training, it is important that the trainer regulates the applied force depending on the patient´s condition. In the developed device, a reaction torque of the slave device is estimated by a disturbance observer. By feeding back the estimated torque to the master device, a master user can feel the reaction torque. In this paper, the structure of the developed device is discussed, and then the control system is described. Finally, the validity of the proposed device is evaluated from the experiments that assume rehabilitation of an elbow.