| Robotic neurorehabilitation is a rapidly growing field in both research and industry. Robotics offer the ability to create less labor-intensive rehabilitation for therapists, while providing an interactive experience for patients. Robotic therapy also provides the advantage of object data collection for therapists to track patient progress; however, there is still both a clinical and market need for a low-cost, assistive hand rehabilitation system. Therefore, the comprehensive design, control, and initial testing of an actuated, assistive 2 degree of freedom hand rehabilitation system with a virtual environment is presented. The 2 degree of freedom hand rehabilitation system, named the Navigator hand rehabilitation system, can provide assistive or resistive mode exercise for flexion and extension of the fingers, as well as pronation and supination of the wrist. The system incorporates a rack and pinion into a series elastic actuator to provide assistive exercise for flexion and extension of the fingers. A belt drive is used to provide actuation to pronation and supination of the wrist. The design, implementation of an impedance control system utilizing position and load feedback is also presented. Both automated control results and preliminary pilot data of resistive mode exercises are presented. A virtual environment to interact with the Navigator system was designed and implemented. The virtual environment incorporates both degrees of freedom, allowing the user to combine the motions and associate the movements with virtual tasks. The impedance controller and virtual environment interact via serial communication. The Navigator device was designed to provide a low-cost solution to providing assistive exercise in 2 DOF with an accompanying virtual environment for a home and clinical setting. |
