Haptic guidance of Light-Exoskeleton for arm-rehabilitation tasks

Fixed-Base Exoskeleton applications have increased rapidly in the last few years, evidently as part of promising rehabilitation robotic programs of the robotics worldwide community, where in particular Human-Robot-Interaction (HRI) plays an important role in its design and control because they are tightly coupled to human-limbs. Exoskeletons embrace HRI as well as technological and theoretical challenges towards real and effective rehabilitation. In this realm, some questions arise, to name a few, what is the relationship between the exchanged energy between human and exoskeleton? How can we assess rehabilitation factors under HRI philosophy? This paper attempts to establish answers to these questions, which can be embodied into rehabilitation HRI using a Light-Exoskeleton. A compliant haptic guidance scheme for human arm subject to minimum-jerk-trajectories criterion is proposed. Preliminary experimental results provide further insight of a haptic guidance scheme taking into account decisive factors into the HRI such as human pose, haptic guidance control, reaching and tracking tasks, the complexity of the virtual environment, and muscles activity.