An end-effector arm rehabilitation robot with VE

A novel powered end-effector arm rehabilitation robot with a game based virtual environment is introduced. The built rehabilitation robot provides both gravitational support and assistive drive force in horizontal planar motion to the user´s arm. The proposed configuration completely decouples the motor´s torque and can senses force in two opposite directions within task space. The paper investigated three different control modes: passive, active non-assist and active assist modes. The proposed active assist controller demonstrated effective performance as it can significantly reduce the muscle activity and force during a task. The generated assistive torque appears to be user friendly as muscle activity remains low during the exercise. In passive mode, the robot is able to maneuver the user´s arm to destination chosen by the user. Surface electromyography (sEMG), force, and hand´s trajectory are real-time monitored. These signals are quite useful since they are used as feedbacks for the controller and analyzed to develop a better controller or exercises for patients.