Basic Research on the Upper Limb Patient Simulator

In the field of rehabilitation, physical therapist plays an important role to resume the social life from disease and physical handicap. However, they can obtain their skills only from their practical experiences. The trainee of the physical therapist can earn the experience only from the clinical practical training, and the opportunity is limited. Therefore, we have been developing the upper limb patient simulator, which reproduce the stiffness of elbow joint to allow trainees to increase the opportunities to obtain the exercise of the physical therapy. The system reproduces the diseases by generating stiffness of the elbow joint, when the trainee is trying to flexion the elbow joint of the patient. In this paper, we tried to reproduce the stiffness of Spasticity, that is often seen the patients of stroke and shoulder paralyzed. In addition, we evaluated reproducibility of the stiffness with out system.