หุ่นยนต์ช่วยฝึกอัตโนมัติสำหรับการฟื้นฟูกล้ามเนื้อแขน

Abstract

Stroke is the primary of death and the leading cause of permanent disability in adults. There are many stroke survivors, who live with a variety of levels of disability and always need rehabilitation activities of daily living. Several studies have reported that usage of rehabilitation robotic devices shows the better improvement outcomes in upper-limb stroke patients than the conventional therapy - nurses or therapists actively help patients with exercise-based rehabilitation. This research focuses on the development of an autonomous robotic trainer designed to guide a stroke patient through an upper-limb rehabilitation task. The robotic device was designed and developed to automate the reaching exercise as mentioned. The designed robotic system is made up of a four-wheel omni-directional mobile robot, an ATI Gamma multi-axis force/torque sensor used to measure contact force and a microcontroller real-time operating system. Proportional plus Integral control was adapted to control the overall performance and stability of the autonomous assistive robot. External force control was successfully implemented to establish the behavioral control strategy for the robot force and velocity control scheme. In summary, the gain tuning for proportional integral (PI) velocity control algorithms was suitably estimated using the Ziegler-Nichols method in which the optimized proportional and integral gains are 2.75 and 0.10 respectively. Additionally, the PI external force control gains were experimentally tuned using the trial and error method based on a set of circular tracking experiments which allow a human participant to move the robot along a desired circular path whilst attempting to minimize the tracking error. The outstanding performance of the tests as specified by the E_RMS of the robot's tracking error was observed with proportional and integral gains of Kp = 0.7 and K; 1.00 respectively. The experimental results also show that the new design of an autonomous assistive robot for upper limb rehabilitation can be used to supplement or facilitate rehabilitation by assisting in the repetitively active and passive therapy. This has been gaining traction in the rehabilitation field as technology advances. To evaluate the feasibility and efficacy of robot-assisted hand rehabilitation in improving arm function abilities, the exercise-based rehabilitation experiments for hand flexion/extension, shoulder flexion/extension and elbow flexion/extension have been carried out to investigate the muscle strength of the human's hand by analysing its EMG signals (measured by the MYO arm band). The EMG signals can be subsequently used for further investigation by a doctor.