Development of a Novel Tele-rehabilitation System

A tele-rehabilitation system is introduced in this paper. The system consists of a master system and a slave system. The master system includes a haptic device (PHANTOM Omni), and the slave system includes a 6-DOF robot arm. The patient hand is fixed to the robot arm, so the therapist can move the patient hand along the predefined track through tele-operation. According to the vision feedback and force feedback, the therapist can adjust his operation. Furthermore, a force tracking experiment has also been performed, and the tracking result can be used to appraise the tele-rehabilitation performance. From the tele-operation experimental result, we can see that the system has good operability, and the agility of upper limbs has been improved greatly.