Simplified assistive devices for upper limbs

The purpose of this research is to develop an assistive device for upper limbs. The disturbance estimation property of the internal model control is applied to detect motion intention of users. The experimental prototype of the assistive device for upper limbs is developed to evaluate the proposed control method. Effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by experiments. The experimental results include also that muscular activities occur in several muscles using surface electromyography. The proposed device is expected to maintain residual function of upper limbs.