The Research Of Limb Rehabilitation Technology Based On Pneumatic Muscle-Exoskeleton And Functional Electrical Stimulation

The population of patients with limb motor dysfunction is increasing, which is caused by neural injuries such as stroke, spinal cord injury, brain trauma and so on. This situation will add some heavy burden on family and society, but rehabilitation training can let paralyzed patients recover and regain their daily livers. Limb rehabilitation is based on the theoretical principle of neuroplasticity. Its development is one from low to high level, from manual rehabilitation to smart rehabilitation. It sets rehabilitation medicine, computer science, mechanical engineering, electronics engineering and control theory as one of the smart rehabilitation. Techniques of rehabilitation robotics and functional electrical stimulation are typical representatives of smart limb rehabilitation in clinical practice. This article brings technologies of both rehabilitation robot and functional electrical stimulation (FES) together with an organic combination, and explores a new economic and practical way of intelligent limb rehabilitation technology.The wearable 5-DoF RUPERT is a lightweight and low-cost upper limb exoskeleton rehabilitation robot, and is designed for a class of dyskinesia patients with high tension upper limb flexor muscles. Each joint is driven by a pneumatic artificial muscle with inherent flexibility. In order to expand the range of RUPERT rehabilitation application including reaching exercises for ordinary patients with flaccid paralysis, FES is used to activate paralyzed muscles. FES induced muscle force and a pneumatic muscle pull force is a new kind of combination acutation. They cooperate together and realize the robotic joint two-way movement. Models of pneumatic muscles and neuromuscular electrical stimulation are built respectively. By use of iterative learning control experimental verification is conducted for this novel combination of upper limb exoskeleton and FES.Hand function rehabilitation plays an important role in patients'daily lives. As the hand grasping and releasing of the finger muscles are small and not easy to produce the desired functional activities induced by FES. With the help of developed electrode array and looking for optimal stimulation pads by matrix scan methods, vigorously grasping and releasing are realized. The patient actively involved in the training can promote rehabilitation. By use of the surface electromyography (EMG) technique the patient's active intent is able to be identified, but surface EMG is buried in stimulus artefact and induced muscle response (M wave). Comb filter and blanking window methods are used to extract intention information for the active intent.Rehabilitation robots grant freedom to rehabilitation therapists in the heavy manual labor, and record real-time data as the basis of objective and quantitative rehabilitation evaluation. The effectiveness of rehabilitation robot trainings needs to be verified by clinical trials. Five degrees of freedom RUPERT upper limb exoskeleton rehabilitation robots are used by patients for clinical trials. The rehabilitation effectiveness of RUPERT doesn't make clinical diffierence based on the analysis of clinical data. Given the clinical results of improved motor function in Phase ? family training, lightweight robots make them possible used in home or community non-hospital environments.A multiple degrees of freedom low-cost pneumatic muscle driven lower limb exoskeleton rehabilitation robot was developed. Lower extremity exoskeleton using a sliding proxy control (PSMC), and PSMC is a kind of model-free control. When the position error is too large, PSMC can produce over-damped slow motion, and avoid force excessive saturation. In early phases of patients passive gait trainings are beneficial for natural gait rehabilitation. In order to further improve gait training, better tracking accuracy is needed. A low chattering robust sliding mode control (CRVC) is developed and applied to lower limb exoskeleton gait training.If ankle joint rehabilitation robot were designed and added to the developed pneumatic exoskeleton, the weight and structure of this proposed hip-knee-ankle exoskeleton would be heavy and complicated. This thesis studied the ankle training key technique of FES applied to the ankle gait rehabilitation. Ankle plantar-flexion/dorsiflexion induced neuromuscular electrical stimulation dynamics are modeled. Experiments are conducted to look for the optimal coordinated control strategy, ankle plantar-flexion/dorsiflexion related muscles. By use of treadmill gait training experiments, the novel hybrid rehabilitation technique is verified.