Towards the development of a portable wrist exoskeleton

This work investigates the design of a portable wrist exoskeleton prototype for rehabilitation of stroke survivors. Portability and ease of use are important to enable stroke victims to exercise in their domestic environments thus maximizing practice and consequently therapy effectiveness. A portable wrist exoskeleton could also be used as an assistive device to augment force. The device could therefore be used by seniors to improve their independent living at home or by workers in industrial settings. In this paper we propose a novel portable exoskeleton having two degrees of freedom to assist movements of the wrist. Surface electromyographic (sEMG) signals are recorded from the forearm and used to control the device. A support vector machine (SVM) is used as real-time classifier. Preliminary tests of the system are reported and discussed.