Isokinetic Muscle Tone Testing System

Parkinson’s disease(PD) is a kind of central nervous degenerative disease with the second highest incidence after the Alzheimer’s disease, which is more common in the elderly. There are four motor symptoms, such as resting tremor, rigidity, bradykinesia and postural instability. The main performance of myotonia is hypermyotonia, causing great pain to the patient. So, combining with the modern measurement and control technology to measure the muscular tone quantificationally is significantly important to diagnose and treat the disease.In view of the above questions, this paper developed a kind of isokinetic muscle tone testing system for Parkinson’s dystonia. Characterized by easy mobility, good security, perfect function, high accuracy and so on, this system, which has the ability to measure the muscle tone in patients with quantitative measurement, is mainly for clinical application in hospitals. Research and development of this system are summarized as follows:(1) Mechanical structure of the system is designed. The mechanical structure of the parts diagram and assembly drawings is drew using Pro/ENGINEER software. We also created a three-dimensional model of the instrument, verified the feasibilitye of the test, and carried on the simulation to verify the movement track of the elbow in the process of testing through the ADAMS.(2) In terms of hardware, the circuit design of the data acquision unit of the system and the system(power supply module, USB communication module, motor control module, a torque sensor module, photoelectric encoder module, peripheral circuit module) is completed. The experimental results show that the system has the ability to acquire the high precision velocity information and torque information, and all the indexes meet the test requirements.(3) In the case of software, the application framework based on MFC is designed and implemented successfully. The major functions include data acquisition display (including torque, angle, etc.), data analysis (corresponding algorithm implementation) and report generation, data storage (patients, physicians information and storage) as well as historical playback (according to the stored data playback during exercise) and other measurement data. The data communication between data processing and analysis software and data acquisition unit is achieved by the USB the driver of which is developed based on NI-VISA.(4) System verification is implemented, by evaluating the developed isokinetic muscle tone testing system, including both static and dynamic testing. Experimental results show that the system has the advantages of low cost, simple structure and high safety, etc. The system can not only measure the muscle tension of patients with Parkinson’s disease, but also can extract the characteristic parameters such as peak torque in the measurement data of muscle tension which provides an important reference for clinical physicians to assess the patients’ clinical diagnosis and treatment.