Robotics For Rehabilitation

Rehabilitation is the treatment process to restore range of motion of a joint, physical sense, and mental ailment that was lost due to an injury, illness, or diseases such as stroke and fractures. Moreover, rehabilitation processes need to spend more than one hour per day depend on the performance of patients. Rehabilitee has to repeat the same training process several times. Robotics is one possible solution to do rehabilitation because it provides safe and intensive rehabilitation to the patient. Moreover, it can help the physiotherapist to deal with several patients at the same time. Furthermore, elbow motion is essential in function of upper extremity movement to position the hand in space. Rehabilitation robots for elbow are widely researched …show more content…
The force – sensorless method is also applied to rehabilitation applications. Gravity and friction of robots and human arms were estimated by using the relationship between kinematic information and reaction torque of the actuators [8]. Pneumatic is another actuator that is used in rehabilitation application. The force-sensorless method was also applied to the pneumatic actuators by using the relationship between position and pressure of actuators to estimate gravity of the robots and human arm [9]. Nevertheless, using pneumatic to be the actuators made the system more complicated. Another technique of force – sensorless that is used for rehabilitation is disturbance observer. The disturbance observer was used to estimate the reaction torque of the actuators. However, in order to estimate gravity and friction of the robots and human wrists, parameters of gravity such as mass, distance between the joint and center of mass used information from CAD model [10]. Similar techniques of force-sensorless by using the disturbance observer for upper extremity to compensate the gravity and friction were also studied [11]-[12]. Another parameter that is needed to identify for gravity and friction compensation is the inertia of robots and human arms. Generally, the parameters such as mass, distance between the joint and center of mass, and inertia of the robots and human arms identify by using CAD model and anthropometric data. Accordingly, this paper proposes the method to estimate the gravity, friction, and inertia without using CAD model information or anthropometric data, and using the reaction torque observer which is a similar technique to disturbance observer, but it measures the external torque of the motor [13]-[15] instead of force