Development of an Active Self-assisted Rehabilitation Simulator for Upper Limbs

Robotic therapy has been shown to increase the range of motion, strength, and agility of arm movements in chronic stroke patients, and many researches in this field have been carried out. In this paper, we are proposing a new approach of active rehabilitation for upper limbs. We suppose one of the subject´s hands is intact, the other one is injured, and the intact hand can direct the mechanical assistance of his injured hand with this system. We have designed a virtual force model, through manipulating the haptic effectors of haptic devices with one or two hands, a virtual object could be controlled to track a pseudorandom signal in a virtual environment, and the different tracking performance for the two conditions will be appraised. During the process of rehabilitation, the real-time vision feedback of virtual environment will be transmitted to operator´s eyes, and the corresponding force feedback of haptic device will be transmitted to operator´s hands. A preliminary tracking experiment was conducted wherein healthy subjects, the tracking performance with the combined efforts of two hands is testified better than one hand alone. In the further experiment, we will test the hypothesis the combined efforts of two hands can improve the rehabilitation performance