Development of a three freedoms ankle rehabilitation robot for ankle training

In recent years, rehabilitation robot has been a trend to replace traditional therapist rehabilitation on hemiplegic rehabilitation. Researchers have proposed many ankle rehabilitation robots on ankle rehabilitation training. However, most of them are only focusing on single freedom training or providing a passive training to the patient. In this paper, a novel ankle robot with 3 freedoms which combines the active training with passive training together is presented. To build the ankle physiological model, an experiment to detect the ankle physiological data is established. And based on the data, an ankle rehabilitation robot with three degrees is proposed. In order to detect the dynamic movements of the ankle, the robot embeds force sensors and motor encoders. Then, the detail design of the mechanism is introduced. There are pedal parts, thigh fixing parts, base, driving unit and sensing unit in mechanism. Each part of the ankle robot is introduced in detail. Comparing with the other ankle rehabilitation robots, this robot uses three blushless motors to direct three rotation motions directly, and the whole structure is simple and reliable.