A cooperative remote rehabilitation system

In this paper a new architecture for robotic rehabilitation is introduced. The mutual interaction between the therapist and patient is accomplished with robots. The architecture divides the system into three subsystems: therapist, patient, and virtual environment, which is controlled locally ensuring that it is input to state stable (ISS). Finally, the interconnection of these subsystems are shown to be stable in the presence of communication time delays. The defined scenario for the proposed architecture is as follows. The patient is considered to be generative in first stage of the rehabilitation process, which means that she/he moves the interacted robot without help from the therapist, until loosing her/his strength. Afterward, in the second stage the therapist assists her/him to continue the movement. Therefore, the patient is active at the first stage and switches to passive mode in the second stage. Hence, the controllers should deal with active robots in the teleoperation as well as passive ones. Finally, simulation results are given to validate the performance of the proposed structure.