Development of a robot-aided neuromuscular rehabilitation method using perturbing forces

Recently, rehabilitation robot has been developed to help therapists. Especially, researches of lower extremity rehabilitation robot have technologically advanced. However, most of the lower extremity rehabilitation robots ignore the voluntary activity of patient and force to move patient´s legs repeatedly. This paper presents a perturbation training method to assist to recover the neuromuscular functions of knee muscles using 1 DOF robot. In the perturbation training method, patients precisely follow the target movements while the perturbing force, which they do not know, is applied. For perturbation training method, perturbing force patterns were designed based on knee movement, and properties of patterns were identified for a healthy subject.