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Currently, lateral epicondylitis of the elbow (tennis elbow) has causes of daily activity such as housework, sport, or use computer overtime. This problem affects 1% to 3% of the population. The symptom of tennis elbow is a sore elbow or a sore to the arm leading to nerve compression syndrome. The aim of this study is to design and develop a massage therapy device for arm in order to help tennis elbow...
Electrophysiological recordings from human muscles can serve as control signals for robotic rehabilitation devices. Given that many diseases affecting the human sensorimotor system are associated with abnormal patterns of muscle activation, such biofeedback can optimize human–robot interaction and ultimately enhance motor recovery. To understand how mechanical constraints and forces imposed by a robot...
The amount of stroke patients has been raising year by year. The traditional treatment supplies the patients with some drugs combining with physical rehabilitation methods. However, in the course of rehabilitation therapy, the recovery of patients often is limited by the level and experience of the therapists. Furthermore, the rehabilitation therapy is uasually lack of scientific and accurate assessments...
With the development in the fields of neurophysiology, clinical diagnosis of muscular degenerative diseases and medical rehabilitation, the electrophysiological reactions of muscles stimulated by micro-force have drawn the attention of scholars both at home and abroad. This paper proposes a new type of vibrotactile device, which can produce micro-stimulating force with variable magnitude, adjustable...
The results of the work on the creation of a hand rehabilitation complex with given mass-size characteristics and various training regimes are presented. A brief description of the three versions of the mechanical part of the rehabilitation device is given. A simplified device control scheme is presented, a brief description of the training modes is given, additional modules that expand the functional...
Highly impaired stroke patients at early stages of recovery are unable to generate enough muscle force to lift the weight of their own arm. Accordingly, task-related training is strongly limited or even impossible. However, as soon as partial or full arm weight support is provided, patients are enabled to perform arm rehabilitation training again throughout an increased workspace. In the literature,...
We evaluated the electromechanical delay (EMD) for the tibialis anterior (TA) muscle during the performance of time-varying ankle dorsiflexions. Subjects were asked to track a sinusoidal trajectory, for a range of amplitudes and frequencies. Motor unit (MU) action potential trains were identified from surface electromyography (EMG) decomposition and summed to generate the cumulative spike train (CST)...
Functional electrical stimulation (FES) is a type of neuroprosthesis in which muscles are stimulated by electrical pulses in order to compensate for the loss of voluntary movement control. Modulating the stimulation intensities to reliably generate movements is a challenging control problem. For the first time, this paper presents a feedback controller for FES to control arm movements in a 2D (table-top)...
In the context of post-stroke patients, suffering of hemiparesis of the hand, robot-aided neuro-motor rehabilitation allows for intensive rehabilitation treatments and quantitative evaluation of patients' progresses. This work presents the design and evaluation of a spring actuated finger exoskeleton. In particular, the spring variables and the interaction forces between the assembly and the hand...
Muscle Synergy method has been proposed in the literature to provide a lower dimensional representation of motor commands from the central nervous system (CNS). Studies on post-stroke patients highlighted how features such as the minimum number of motor synergies accounting for most of the data variance correlate with impairments and motor function. In this study, we target healthy subjects to establish...
In this work, a surface skin electromyography(sEMG)-based control solution for elbow wearable assistive devices during load lifting tasks is presented. The goal of the controller consists in limiting the user's muscle activity during the task execution, in such a way that the assistive device can partially compensate the load-related biceps muscle effort. Since sEMG-driven control strategies based...
Static stretching is widely performed to decrease muscle tone as a part of rehabilitation protocols. Finding out the optimal duration of static stretching is important to minimize the time required for rehabilitation therapy and it would be helpful for maintaining the patient's motivation towards daily rehabilitation tasks. Several studies have been conducted for the evaluation of static stretching;...
Difficulty of swallowing, called dysphagia, leads to aspiration pneumonia which is particularly a big health concern in aging societies. Therefore, prevention and treatment of dysphagia would contribute to extending healthy-life and QOL of elderly people and decreasing healthcare cost. Robotics technologies are expected as one of the effective methods to solve the problem in terms of detecting malfunction...
Some unilateral lower-limb amputees load the intact limb more than the prosthetic limb. This can cause chronic pains, fatigue, lumbago, and joint diseases, including knee osteoarthritis. To avoid and counteract these symptoms it is necessary to improve their asymmetric gait. Increasing the function of the hip abductor muscle is important to maintaining symmetrical weight distribution. Therefore, the...
This work aims at estimating the musculoskeletal forces acting in the human lower extremity during locomotion on rough terrains. We employ computational models of the human neuro-musculoskeletal system that are informed by multi-modal movement data including foot-ground reaction forces, 3D marker trajectories and lower extremity electromyograms (EMG). Data were recorded from one healthy subject locomoting...
Pneumatic muscles (PMs)-driven robots become more and more popular in medical and rehabilitation field as the actuators are intrinsically complaint and thus are safer for patients than traditional rigid robots. This paper proposes a new compliance adaptation method of a soft ankle rehabilitation robot that is driven by four pneumatic muscles enabling three rotational movement degrees of freedom (DoFs)...
In this study, we developed a 4-degrees of freedom (DOF) force feedback device independent of its operational component comprising pneumatic artificial muscles and magnetorheological clutches. Research and development of force feedback devices is becoming popular in fields such as entertainment, remote operation, and rehabilitation. These areas of research are related to virtual reality and augmented...
We present a novel control approach for assistive lower-extremity exoskeletons. In particular, we implement a virtual pivot point (VPP) template model inspired leg force feedback based controller on a lower-extremity powered exoskeleton (LOPES II) and demonstrate that it can effectively assist humans during walking. It has been shown that the VPP template model is capable of stabilizing the trunk...
We have developed a rehabilitation training system called the Useful and Ultimate Rehabilitation System PARKO (UR System PARKO) to promote the recovery of motor function of the severe chronic plegic hand of stroke patients. This system was equipped with two functions to realize two conditions: (1) fixing of all fingers to a hyperextended position and (2) extending the elbow joint while applying resistance...
In recent years, ventilation equipment has been installed in various structures to draw in outdoor air and circulate indoor air. These ventilation installations have pipes (ducts) through which air flows. If dust accumulates in a duct, it will be carried indoors by the airflow. Dust adversely affects human health, and so these ducts must be cleaned regularly. However, the existing cleaning methods...
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