Patient-cooperative control strategies for coordinated functional arm movements

An increasingly large number of people in industrialized countries suffers from a stroke every year. The rehabilitation robot ARMin has been developed for the arm rehabilitation of stroke patients and other neurological patients. In this work, a control strategy for training Activities of Daily Living (ADL) with ARMin is presented. The training of ADLs motivates the subject and facilitates relearning of functional movements. A combination of impedance and admittance control is implemented and a control strategy to support the subject in a patient-cooperative way during the training is introduced. The control strategy is based on the minimum intervention principle thus maximizing the subject´s own contribution to the task. First results with healthy subjects are presented. The algorithms are described as a general concept and can also be applied to other rehabilitation robots.