| The goal of this project is to design and build a computer-based robot control system for rehabilitation of patients who have lost upper-limb function as a result of injury or neurological condition. The current rehabilitation therapies and evaluation techniques in clinical settings are subjective and labor intensive. Also, the cost of caring for the large numbers of severely handicapped patients is correspondingly high, not only because of their large numbers but because of the extent of their disabilities that require elaborate facilities for proper care and treatment. Rehabilitation centers sometimes use continuous passive motion (CPM) machines to provide a repetitious form of upper extremity exercise for recovering patients. However, there is no machine that can either offer objective and quantitative evaluation of patients' muscle strength or partially assist the weak patients for limb movement.;By utilizing gravity neutral compensation and direct mechanical measurement of the muscle's torque, this robot system can supply a passive and repetitive movement, monitor the patient's efforts (while providing partial assistance for various strength level of patients), record daily progress, measure static and dynamic elbow stiffness, calculate forearm inertia, and evaluate the need for intense exercise. The evaluation will help create a time history of improvement for the patient, which can be used to study the effects of such therapy on limb rehabilitation. A digital computer with data acquisition capability provides software control over system parameters and generates a user-friendly human interface to the therapist in charge of the rehabilitation exercise. This dissertation also presents experimental results, which validate the methodology and demonstrate the robot's capability. As in the process of developing a valid, reliable, and sensitive muscle stiffness measurement system, this robot system is a prototype machine and can be further developed to help physicians and therapists treat the spastic patient and to aid in the studies of neuromuscular mechanisms underlying spastic hypertonia. |
