Development of a rehabilitation robot for hand and wrist rehabilitation training

Up to now, the number of hemiplegia rehabilitation devices is increasing quickly along with hemiplegic patients´. But most of hand rehabilitation training just limit to the fingers flexible training of patients´ affected hand. They not only ignore the importance of functional training of hand, but also wrist cooperative training during rehabilitation process. In our new research, we proposed a novel hand and wrist rehabilitation robot to achieve grasp functional training of hand except thumb and intorsion/extorsion and dorsiflexion/plantar flexion of wrist, which provides a creative hand rehabilitation way for hemiplegic patients. In this paper, we will introduce the detail design of the robot. It mainly includes two rehabilitation units -wrist rehabilitation unit and hand rehabilitation unit, which can realize separate motion or cooperate motion of hand and wrist based on patients´ willingness. What´s more, the torque sensor unit is purposely designed to detect feedback torque of related motion instead of available ones in the market, which makes the whole mechanical structure more compact. In a word, this novel hand and wrist rehabilitation robot will have a promising prospect.