Deans' stroke musings: Design and control of a 2 degree of freedom upper limb robotic rehabilitation device

Changing stroke rehab and research worldwide now.Time is Brain! trillions and trillions of neurons that DIE each day because there are NO effective hyperacute therapies besides tPA(only 12% effective). I have 523 posts on hyperacute therapy, enough for researchers to spend decades proving them out. These are my personal ideas and blog on stroke rehabilitation and stroke research. Do not attempt any of these without checking with your medical provider. Unless you join me in agitating, when you need these therapies they won't be there.

What this blog is for:

My blog is not to help survivors recover, it is to have the 10 million yearly stroke survivors light fires underneath their doctors, stroke hospitals and stroke researchers to get stroke solved. 100% recovery. The stroke medical world is completely failing at that goal, they don't even have it as a goal. Shortly after getting out of the hospital and getting NO information on the process or protocols of stroke rehabilitation and recovery I started searching on the internet and found that no other survivor received useful information. This is an attempt to cover all stroke rehabilitation information that should be readily available to survivors so they can talk with informed knowledge to their medical staff. It lays out what needs to be done to get stroke survivors closer to 100% recovery. It's quite disgusting that this information is not available from every stroke association and doctors group.

Saturday, November 9, 2013

Design and control of a 2 degree of freedom upper limb robotic rehabilitation device

Have your doctor see if this is better than the Saeboflex. It seems to include wrist movement also. Another great thesis.
http://iris.lib.neu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1079&context=mech_eng_theses&sei-redir=1&referer=http%3A%2F%2Fscholar.google.com%2Fscholar_url%3Fhl%3Den%26q%3Dhttp%3A%2F%2Firis.lib.neu.edu%2Fcgi%2Fviewcontent.cgi%253Farticle%253D1079%2526context%253Dmech_eng_theses%26sa%3DX%26scisig%3DAAGBfm1RQ0ouYlphaM6wdOJoLQ0PS8lwGA%26oi%3Dscholaralrt#search=%22http%3A%2F%2Firis.lib.neu.edu%2Fcgi%2Fviewcontent.cgi%3Farticle%3D1079%26context%3Dmech_eng_theses%22

Abstract

Robotic neurorehabilitation is a rapidly growing field in both research and industry. Robotics offer the ability to create less labor-intensive rehabilitation for therapists, while providing an interactive experience for patients. Robotic therapy also provides the advantage of object data

collection for therapists to track patient progress; however, there is still both a clinical and market need for a low-cost, assistive hand rehabilitation

system. Therefore, the comprehensive design, control, and initial testing of an actuated, assistive 2 degree of freedom hand rehabilitation system

with a virtual environment is presented.

The 2 degree of freedom hand rehabilitation system, named the Navigator hand rehabilitation system, can provide assistive or resistive mode exercise for flexion and extension of the fingers, as well as pronation and supination of the wrist. The system incorporates a rack and pinion into a series elastic actuator to provide assistive exercise for flexion and extension of the fingers. A belt drive is used to provide actuation to pronation and

supination of the wrist.

The design, implementation of an impedance control system utilizing position and load feedback is also presented. Both automated control results and preliminary pilot data of resistive mode exercises are presented. A virtual environment to interact with the Navigator system was designed and implemented. The virtual environment incorporates both degrees of freedom, allowing the user to combine the motions and associate the movements with virtual tasks. The impedance controller and virtual environment interact via serial communication.

The Navigator device was designed to provide a low cost solution to providing assistive exercisein 2 DOF with an accompanying virtual environment for a home and clinical setting.