Quasi-3-DOF Rehabilitation System for Upper Limbs: Its Force-Feedback Mechanism and Software for Rehabilitation

Rehabilitation robots are effective to evaluate quantitatively rehabilitative therapies. Some kinds of haptic devices have been developed by many researchers and evaluated its efficiency with clinical tests for example upper limb training for patients with spasticity after stroke. Almost all the devices for upper limb rehabilitation have only 2-DOF for its active motion (except for wrists). But the upper limb of human works in 3-D space even except for the wrist; therefore designing a rehabilitation system for 3-D training is important. We developed new" haptic devices which have 2-DOF force-feedback function on a worktable but the inclination of the worktable can be adjusted. We named this system "Quasi-3-DOF Rehabilitation System for Upper Limbs" or "PLEMO". In this paper, we describe the mechanism of PLEMO and its software for the upper limb rehabilitation.