Research And Development Of Pulmonary Rehabilitation Training Robot For COPD Patients

As a kind of progressive obstructive respiratory disease,chronic obstructive pulmonary disease(COPD)is seriously harmful to people's health(especially for the elder).People with COPD usually have symptoms of respiratory discomfort,body residual gas,leg tiredness,dyspnea,cough and malnutrition.The disease will cause lung cancer,coronary heart disease and other complications if it doesn't treat in time,which is greatly harmful to people's daily life.Respiratory rehabilitation training is the only effective physical rehabilitation method except drug therapies,can increase patient's ventilator capacity,develop the function of the respiratory muscle,improve the patient's fitness and help to cure the disease.However,because of the dyspnea,the endurance of the COPD patients is not good,which results that patient usually cannot insist on effective rehabilitation training exercise.In order to solve this problem,we creatively develop a kind of respiratory rehabilitation training robot,which can assist COPD patients with respiratory rehabilitation training.This kind of robot,can reduce the upper body's weight to relieve the burden of breathing and increase the endurance of rehabilitation training on exercise and improve the function of respiratory muscles.The main work in this paper includes the physical design of the robot,the control system of the robot and the verification experiments.This robot is driven by three motors,which can achieve three different DOFs of motion,including the vertical motion,the motion of push-pull arms and the motion of the extrusion of the abdominal.The first two motions can reduce the upper body's weight and expand the chest,and the last motion can squeeze the patient's abdomen to help the gas exchange.Utilizing respiratory sensors and motion sensors,this robot can get the COPD patient's respiratory information and motion states,and change the training mode according to the respiratory information of patients and match the respiratory motion with the respiratory rehabilitation training exercise,which ensures that COPD patients can achieve the best rehabilitation training.In order to verify the effectiveness of the robot,we carried on a series of verification experiments.In one kind of experiment,we utilize the wireless surface EMG system to compare the respiratory muscle's motion between the static state and the training state,which concludes that the respiratory muscle's motion under training state is much lower than that under static state.We also use the VICON motion capture system to observe the motion of the chest and the respiratory muscle and we find that the motion of the chest and respiratory muscle under training state is lower than that under the static state.In addition,we also use the K4b2 system to accurately measure the consumption of O2 and the emission of CO2,and we find that the consumption of gas under training state is lower than that under static state,These experiments prove that the respiratory rehabilitation training robot can effectively reduce the respiratory burden of COPD patients and decrease the consumption of the respiratory muscles when the patient goes on the same respiration.Meanwhile,we study the phase relation between the respiration and training motion,which helps to match the respiration with the training motion.