Design, optimization, and analysis of a human-machine compatibility upper extremity exoskeleton rehabilitation robot

Abstract

For rehabilitation therapy robots, the movement range, and comfort of rehabilitation are crucial to the patient’s training and recovery and are also key factors in the design and performance evaluation of rehabilitation robots. In this paper, a highly harmonized upper extremity rehabilitation robot was proposed based on the human-machine coupling system model. Meanwhile, the shoulder joint structure of the rehabilitation robot was optimized to study the workspace range of this robot, the workspace of the upper extremity rehabilitation robot was fitted based on kinematic equations and the workspace volume size for different shoulder joint angles was analyzed. Finally, the upper extremity exoskeleton rehabilitation robot prototype was used to conduct the movement range tracking experiment and human-machine compatibility experiment in healthy volunteers to verify the rehabilitation training range and movement comfort of the rehabilitation robot. The experimental results show that when the optimized upper extremity exoskeleton rehabilitation robot was used to move in the coronal plane and sagittal plane of the human body, the overlaps of the movement range of the upper extremity wrist point W and the movement range of the healthy person was 97.23% and 97.66%, respectively, while the human-machine interaction force generated during the movement was mainly concentrated in the range of 0–10 kPa, which belongs to the low-pressure range of human-machine interaction. Therefore, this upper extremity rehabilitation robot can increase the movement range of patients’ upper extremities and improve the comfort of rehabilitation training.