Backrgound

Current Rehabilitation Exoskeletons

Rehabilitation robots have been used to treat the patients with impairments in motor control after stroke, spinal cord injury (SCI) or other deseases. The advantages of robotic rehabilitation are 1) reduction of physical efforts of clinical therapists, 2) quantitative assessment of the patients from various sensors in the robotic system, 3) assistant of patients' repetitive training with appropriate purpose. Several gait rehabilitation robots are developed such as ALEX, Lokomat, and COWALK [1]-[3].

                        Lokomat (HOCOMA, Switzerland)                               ALEX (Columbia Univ. US)                            COWALK (KIST, South Korea)

Although these robotic exoskeletons are performing important role in gait rehabilitation, these systems are bulky and expensive, which lead low accessibility to the patients. Moreover, control and manipulation of this complex multi degree-of-freedoms (DOFs) system is challenging issue.

Objective

The objective of this project is to build 1-DOF gait rehabilitation robot that can generate human-like gait patterns for the stroke and spinal cord injury patients.

[1] S. K. Banala, S. H. Kim, S. K. Agrawal, J. P. Scholz, “Robot assisted gait training with active leg exoskeleton (ALEX),” IEEE Transactions on Neural Systems and Rehabilitation Engineering, Vol. 17, No. 1, pp. 2–8, Feb. 2010.

[2] S. Jezernik, G. Colombo, and M. Morari, “Automatic gait-pattern adaptation algorithms for rehabilitation with a 4-DOF robotic orthosis,” IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation, Vol. 20, No. 3, pp. 574–582, Jun. 2004.

[3] C.Junk, J. Choi, S. Park, J. Lee, C.Kim, and S. Kim, "Design and control of an exoskeleton system for gait rehabilitation capable of natural pelvic movement ," IEEE International Conference on Robotics and System, 2014.