Our senses are physiological tools for perceiving environmental information. Humans have at least five senses (as defined and classified by Aristotle). These senses are: sight or vision, hearing or audition, smell or olfaction, touch or taction, and taste or gustation. They are perceived when sensory neurons react to stimuli and send messages to the central nervous system. We actually have more than five senses. For example, Gibson has stated that we have both outward-orientated (exteroceptive) senses and inward-orientated (interoceptive) senses [127]. The sense of equilibrium, also known as proprioception, is one example of these other senses. Each of the sense modalities is characterized by many factors, such as the types of received and accepted data, the sensitivity to the data in terms of temporal and spatial resolutions, the information processing rate or bandwidth, and the capability of the receptors to adapt to the received data.

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Several methods have been proposed for upper limb muscle training using exercise devices or machines to strengthen the muscle groups. However, most exercises control the direction of resistance to isolate specific muscle groups that need to be trained. A compact and cost-effective upper limb exoskeleton design with a 3-DOF shoulder joint and a 1-DOF elbow joint allows a patient or a healthy individual to move the limb in different planes and increases resistance through adjustments of the spring length to train more muscle groups. The exoskeleton springs were designed to equalize the joint torques for the shoulder and elbow joints with the joint torques obtained from free-weight exercises. Experimental data of the joint torques for two healthy subjects for shoulder abduction–adduction, flexion–extension, and elbow flexion–extension exercises with the exoskeleton were compared to measurements obtained from the upper limb dumbbell lateral raise, the dumbbell frontal raise, and the dumbbell curl exercises. The results of our preliminary evaluation showed that this design had an equivalent effect on the joint torques of shoulder and elbow to the free-weight exercises without the risk of overextension injury. Ultimately, this study provided a design and prototype for an upper limb exoskeleton.

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