Preliminary study on robotic exercise therapy

This paper proposes a new concept of robotic exercise that displays human muscle force during rehabilitation procedures. The estimation is made by combination of an isokinetic dynamometer improved from its original usage for rehabilitation and a conventional muscle force estimation method based on a musculo-skeletal model which has been applied for human gait analysis. The novel isokinetic dynamometer the authors developed has a force sensor for the musculo-skeletal model analysis, and provides an arbitrary training trajectory control function. The musculo-skeletal model analysis is constructed limitedly to the under limb movement, and the muscle force estimation is made in the thigh area by employing the two optimization methods. As a result of experiments, we confirmed that there is really not much difference between the results of two methods.